My own was in like case, no pocket-handkerchief being available. So I said, "Mine would be all right in a second, if I could only get to wipe it."
Then said Bettesworth, innocently (for he had no suspicion how funny his reply was), "Ah, but that's what you can't do, without makin' your face all dirty."
With our noses distilling dew-drops, and our hands gloved-over with mud and aching with cold, we may be pardoned, I hope, for complaining sometimes of the weather. I believe that really we liked it; for down there so close to the grass and the soil we were entering into intimacies like theirs, with the cool winter air; but our enjoyment was subconscious, whereas consciously we criticized and were not too well pleased. After one interval of grumbling, I tried to cheer up, with the suggestion, "We must be thankful it isn't so cold as yesterday." Bettesworth, however, was not to be so easily appeased, but replied, "We don't feel it down here, where 'tis so sheltered, but depend upon it, 'tis purty cold down the road, when you gets into the wind. I met old Steve when I was comin' back from dinner. 'How d'ye get on up there?' I says." (Up there is on the ridge of the hill, where Steve works in a garden.) "''Tis purty peaky up there,' he says. I'll lay it is, too. I shouldn't think there's anybody got a much colder job than he have. 'Pend upon it, he do feel it."
"I was afraid on Sunday we were in for more snow."
"Ah, so was I. I found my old hard broom. Stacked in he was, behind a lot o' peasticks an' clutter. I'd missed 'n for a long time—ever since our young Dave" (his nephew's son) "come to clear up the garden for me. He'd pulled up the peasticks an' put 'em in the old shed—well, I'd told 'n to. And I fancied that's where the broom must be. So Sunday I fetched 'em all out of it and got 'n out and took 'n indoors with the shovel, in case any snow should come.
"Little Dave's gone on 'long o' George Bryant, up at Powell's. Handy little chap, he is...."
In this way, so long as the turf-laying lasted, Bettesworth's talk went drivelling on. Was he really getting dull? I had begun by fancying so; and yet as I listened to him, perhaps myself benumbed a little by the cold open air, something rather new to me—a quality in the old man's conversation more intrinsically pleasing than I had previously known—began to make its subtle appeal. Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought—the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth's brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village, had at last reached my dull senses.
The themes might be trivial, yet the talk was not ignoble. The rippling comments upon their affairs, which swing in perpetual ebb and flow amidst the labouring people, lead them perhaps no farther; and yet, should they not be said? Could they be dispensed with? Are they not an integral part of life? Let me quote another fragment:
"After that rain yesterday, old Kid says, up in that clay at Waterman's when you takes your spud out o' the ground you can't see whether 'tis a spud or a board. And it's enough to break your shoulders all to pieces. He was tired last night, he says."
Well—to me the observation justifies itself, and I like it for its own sake. It touched me with an elusive vitality of its own, for which after our turf-laying I began generally to listen in Bettesworth's talk, and which nowadays I hear in that of his neighbours, as when old Nanny Norris meets me on the road and stops for a gossip.