XVIII
The Old Year, so far as my notes show it, had run to its close without event for Bettesworth, just as the New Year was to do, excepting for one big trouble. Yet he was not quite the man at the opening of 1903 that he had been at the opening of 1902. The twelve uneventful months had, in fact, been leaving their marks upon him—marks almost imperceptible as each occurred, yet progressive, cumulative in their effect. On this day or on that, none could have pointed to a change in the old man, or alleged that he was not so the day before; but as the seasons swung round it was impossible not to perceive how he was aging. It is well, therefore, to pause and see what he had become by this time before we enter upon another year of his life.
There was one silent witness to the increasing decay of his powers that could not be overlooked. The garden gave him away. People coming to visit me and it were embarrassed to know what to say, or they even hinted that it would be an economy to allow Bettesworth a small pension and hire a younger man, who would do as much work, and do it better, in half the time. As if I needed to be told that! But then they were not witnesses, with me, of the pluck—better worth preserving than any garden—with which Bettesworth sought to make amends for his vanished youth. His tenacity deepened my regard for him, even while its poor results almost wore out my patience. He who had once moved with such vigour was getting slow; and the time was coming, if it had not come, when I had to wait and dawdle while he dragged along behind me from one part of the garden to another. A more serious matter was that with greater effort on his part the garden ground was less well worked. I don't believe he knew that. He used a favourite old spade, worn down like himself, and never realized that "two spits deep" with this tool were little better than one spit with a proper one; and he could not make out why the carrots forked, and the peas failed early.
But the worst trial of all was due to another and more pitiful cause. I could reconcile myself to indifferent crops—after all, I had enough—but exasperation was daily renewed by the little daily failures in routine work, owing to his defective sight, which grew worse and worse. There were the garden paths. With what care the old man drew his broom along them, working by faith and not sight, blindly feeling for the rubbish he could not see, and getting it all save from some corner or other of which his theories had forgotten to take account! Little nests of disorder collected in this way, to-day here, to-morrow somewhere else, surprising, offensive to the eye. Again, at the lawn-mowing, never man worked harder than Bettesworth, or more conscientiously; but he could not see the track of his machine, and seams of uncut grass often disfigured the smoothness of the turf even after he had gone twice over it to make sure of perfection. It was alarming to see him go near a flower border. He would avoid treading on any plant of whose existence he knew, by an act of memory; but he could not know all, and I had to limit his labours strictly to that part of the garden he planted or tended himself.
What made the situation so difficult to deal with was that his intentions were so good. He was himself hardly aware that he failed, and I rather sought to keep him in ignorance of the fact than otherwise. I felt instinctively that, once it was admitted, all would be over for Bettesworth; because he was incapable of mending, and open complaints from me must in the end have led to his dismissal. For that I was not prepared. He would never get another employment; to cut him off from this would be like saying that the world had no more use for him and he might as well die out of the way. But I had no courage to condemn him to death because my lawn was ill cut. With one exception, when I sent him to an oculist to see if spectacles would help him (the oculist reported to me that there was "practically no sight left"), we kept up the fiction that he could see to do his work. And his patient, silent struggles to do well were not without an element of greatness.
But though the drawbacks to employing the old man were many, and such as to set me oftentimes wondering how long I should be able to endure them, it must not be thought that he was altogether useless. If he was slow, he was still strong; if he was half blind, he was wholly efficient at heavy straightforward work. During this winter, in making some radical changes which involved a good deal of excavating work, Bettesworth was like a first-rate navvy, and eagerly put all his experience at my disposal. There was a trench to be opened for laying a water-pipe. With a young man to help him, he dug it out and filled it in again, in about half the time that the job would have taken if it had been entrusted to a contractor. In one place a little pocket of bright red gravel was found. This, of his own initiative, he put aside for use on the paths which he was too blind to sweep clean. But, in truth, a sort of sympathy with my desires and a keen eye to my interests frequently inspired him to do the right thing in this kind of way. He had identified himself with the place; was proud of it; boasted to his friends of "our" successes; and like a miser over his hoard, never spared himself where the good of the garden was concerned, but with aching limbs—his ankle where he had once broken it pained him cruelly at times—went slaving on for his own satisfaction, when I would have suggested to him to take things easily.
I have said that there were those who considered him too expensive a protégé for me. There were others, I am sure, to whom he appeared no better than a tedious old man, opinionated, gossiping, not over clean. Pretty often—especially in bad weather, when there was not much he could be doing—he went on errands for me to the town, to fetch home groceries and take vegetables to my friends, and all that sort of thing. At my friends' he liked calling; they owed to him rather than to me not a few cookings of cabbage and sticks of celery, for which they would reward him with praise, and perhaps a glass of beer or the price of it. Afterwards I would hear lamentings from them how long he had stayed talking. Once or twice—hardly oftener in all these years—I had to speak to him in sharp reprimand for being such a prodigious long time gone; for the glass of beer and the gossip where he delivered his cabbages did not always satisfy his cravings for society and comfort: he would turn into a public-house—"Dan Vickery's" for choice—and come back too late and too talkative. It was a fault, if you like; but the wonder to me is, not that he sometimes drank two glasses where one was enough, but that, with his wit and delight in good company, he did not oftener fall from grace. Those two or three occasions when he earned my sharp reproofs, and for half a day afterwards lost his sense of comfort in me as a friend, were probably times when his home had grown too dreary, his outlook too hopeless, even for his fortitude. Some readers, no doubt, will be offended by his taste for beer. I hope there will be some to give him credit for the months and years in which, with these few exceptions, he controlled the appetite. Remember, he had no religious convictions, nor did the peasant traditions by which he lived afford him much guidance. Alone, of his own inborn instinct for being a decent man, he strove through all his life, not to be rich, but to live upright and unashamed. Fumbling, tiresome, garrulous, unprofitable, lean and grim and dirty in outward appearance, the grey old life was full of fight for its idea of being a man; full of fight and patience and stubborn resolve not to give in to anything which it had learnt to regard as weakness. I remember looking down, after I had upbraided a failure, at the old limbs bending over the soil in such humility, and I could hardly bear the thought that very likely they were tired and aching. This enfeebled body—dead now and mouldering in the churchyard—was alive in those days, and felt pain. Do but think of that, and then think of the patient, resolute spirit in it, which almost never indulged its weaknesses, but had its self-respect, its half-savage instincts toward righteousness, its smothered tastes, its untold affections and its tenderness. That was the old man, gaunt-limbed, but good-tempered, partially blind and fumbling, but experienced, whom we have to imagine now indomitably facing yet another year of his life, and a prospect in which there is little for him to hope for. Nay, there was much for him to dread, had he known. A separate chapter, however, must be given to the severe trouble which, as already hinted, overtook him in the early weeks of 1903.
XIX
While the advance of time was affecting Bettesworth himself, another influence had begun to play havoc with his environment. A glance in retrospect at this nook of our parish during this same winter of 1902-3 shows the advent of new circumstances, of a kind full of menace to men like him. Things and persons of the twentieth century had begun to invade our valley, where men and women so far had lived as if the nineteenth were not half through.
The coming of the new influence was perhaps too subtle for Bettesworth to be conscious of it. Perhaps he marked only the normal crumbling away of the old-fashioned life, by death or departure of his former associates, and failed to notice that these were no longer being replaced, as they would have been in former times, by others like them. Of our old friends close around us four or five were by this time dead, and others had moved farther afield. We missed especially old Mrs. Skinner. Since her husband's death in 1901 her domestic arrangements had not been happy, and in the autumn just past she had disposed of her little property, and was gone to live across the valley. But note the circumstances. Only some ten years previously her husband had bought this property—the cottage and nearly an acre of ground—for about £70. He may have subsequently added £50 to its value. Now, however, his widow was able to sell it for something like £220. The increase shows what a significant change was overtaking us.