We spoke afterwards of other donkeys, and particularly of one—a lady's of the neighbourhood—which, as Bettesworth had been told, was "groomed and put into the stable with a cloth over him, jest like the other horses.... Law! if donkeys was looked after, they'd kill all the ponies (by outworking them), but they don't get no chance."
The harvesting expeditions into Sussex, and the keeping of cows on the common, were parts of an antique peasant economy now quite obsolete. In August of this year a further glimpse of it was obtained, in a conversation which, I grieve to say, I neglected to set down in Bettesworth's own words.
August 21, 1903.—There was a time shortly after his marriage, and, as I guess, between forty and fifty years ago, when he rented a cottage and garden quite close to this house. The price of wheat being then two shillings the gallon, he used to grow wheat in his garden; and his average crop was at the rate of fourteen or fifteen sacks to the acre, or nearly twice as much as local farmers now succeed in growing.
In making this use of his garden he was by no means singular. Many of his neighbours at that date grew their own corn; and it was Mrs. Bettesworth's brother (a man still living, and now working a threshing engine) who dibbed it for them. The dibber ("dessay he got it now") was described by Bettesworth—a double implement, made for dibbing two rows at a time. It had two "trees," like spade handles, set side by side, each of which was socketed into an iron bent forwards like a letter L. On the under-side of each iron, four excrescences made four shallow holes in the ground, "about like a egg"; and a rod connecting the two irons kept the double tool rigid. Walking backwards, the man using this implement could press into the ground two rows of egg-shaped holes at a time, as fast as the women could follow with the seed. For it seems that two women followed the dibber, carrying their seed-corn in basins and dropping one or two grains into each hole. The ground was afterwards rolled with a home-made wooden roller; and as soon as the corn came up the hoe was kept going, the rows being about eight inches asunder, until the crop was knee high.
Is it wrong to give so much space to these haphazard recollections? They interrupt the narrative of Bettesworth's slow and weary decline—that must be admitted. Yet, following as they do so close upon his wretched experiences in contact with more modern life, they help to explain why he and modernity were so much at odds. He had been a labourer, a soldier, all sorts of things; but he had been first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now.
In course of time, but not yet, a good deal more was to be gleaned from him about this former kind of country existence. I shall take it as it comes, and, while Bettesworth is losing grip of life, let the contrast between him dying and the modern world eagerly living make its own effect. As now this detail, and now that, is added to the mass, perhaps a little of the atmosphere may be restored in which his mind still had its being, and through which he saw our time, yet not as we see it.
Meanwhile, there is one reminiscence which stands by itself and throws light on little or nothing, but is too queer to be omitted. Having no place of its own, it is given here because it comes next in my note-book.
October 24, 1903.—It was the weather that started our talk. Bettesworth could not remember anything like this year 1903 for rain. But there! he supposed we should get some fine weather again "somewhen?"
Now, I had just been reading some history, and was able to answer with some confidence, "Oh yes. There have been wet years before this." And I mentioned the year after the Battle of Waterloo.
Then Bettesworth, "Let's see. Battle of Waterloo? That was in '47, wa'n't it?"