All Men are Ghosts

by L. P. Jacks

The same held true, I should think, of Jeremy's grandfather, to judge by another relic carefully treasured in the house. This was an enormous iron crowbar, the mere lifting of which was a challenge to "put your back into it." With this weapon the Jeremy of that day had successfully defended himself against a crowd of rascals who came out to burn his ricks in '32. Some memories of that fight were still extant in the village, and a bonny fight it must have been. My informant, an eyewitness of the scene, was too nearly imbecile to stand cross-examination; but what he remembered was to the point. Aware of the impending danger, Jeremy had built his ricks that year within the defences of his courtyard, the walls of which he had rendered unscalable by various devices. It only remained, therefore, to defend the gate; and here were posted Timothy Caine with a maul, Job Henderson with a flail, an unnamed woman with a cauldron of flour to fling in the face of the enemy, and the farmer with the crowbar. These won the day; and more I cannot tell you, because my informant's language, which I could never induce him to vary, became extremely metaphorical at this point: "Master Jeremy, he give 'em pen and ink: pen and ink is what he give 'em with the crowbar, sir, that he did; there was none on 'em wanted hitting twice, no, not one; and, my eye! to see the flour a-flying! What a steam it made! I can see it now."

Agricultural experts who visited our parish, though forced to admire the excellence of Jeremy's farming, were wont to criticise him for being "too slow." Now there, I think, they were distinctly wrong. I have nothing to say against Agricultural Science: I wish there was more of it; but if it has a weakness it lies in a certain tendency to be "quick" precisely at those points where Jeremy was triumphantly "slow." His slowness was simply the instinctive timing of his action to the movements of Nature, who is also "slow" in relation to yet higher powers. You would often think that he was dawdling; but if you looked into the matter you were sure to find that just then Nature was dawdling too, and that Jeremy was beating her at a waiting game. So, too, if you watched a python creeping from branch to branch or lying coiled in a glass case you would judge it to be the slowest of beasts; but not if you saw it springing on its prey. There was much of the wisdom of the serpent in Mr Jeremy, as there must be in every man who earns his living by battle with the natural order of the world. "I wakes regularly at five o'clock," he said. "But I never gets up till a quarter past. What do I think about in that quarter of an hour? Why, I spends it in cutting out." By "cutting out" he meant the process of mentally arranging the day's work for himself and for every man on the farm. The python on the branch, I imagine, is often engaged in "cutting out." "In farming," he added, for he was giving a lesson, "you ought to cut out fresh every day, and not every week, as some farmers do—though I've knowed them as never cut out at all. And cutting out's a thing you can never learn in books and colleges. It comes by experience—and a light hand. Sometimes you must cut out rough, and sometimes you must cut out fine—mostly according to the weather and the time o' year—and always leave a bit somewhere as isn't cut out at all. And when you've done the cutting out, take a look out o' the window and tap your glass. Do it the minute you jumps out o' bed. And if there's been a change in the wind during the night, cut out again while you're pulling your breeches on and tear up what you've cut out already. And don't give no orders to anybody till you've had your breakfast—leastways a cup o' tea; it clears a man's head and lets you see if you've been making any mistakes. I've often cut out six or seven times between waking and giving the day's orders—what with the tricks of the weather and my head not being as clear as it ought to have been." And I wondered how often Napoleon had done the same thing.

Indeed, if I may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. Such slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in farming, in war, and in many other things. And of Mr Jeremy we may say that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. This gave him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being "slow." At the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in Agricultural Colleges.

I have to confess that my acquaintance with Mr Jeremy has not been without a certain demoralising effect. It has corrupted the brightness of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my youth. I will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether vanished; but, thanks to Mr Jeremy's influence, I have learned to see them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land and its uses I have entirely lost the very little effectiveness I once had. There was a time when if anyone mentioned the land I always wanted to make a speech. Now I feel—what no doubt I ought to have felt then—that I must hold my tongue. To be quite frank, my views on the land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. That a farmer owning his own land was cæteris paribus necessarily better off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth discussion. But if I had to speak on that point now, I should hesitate and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience to regard me as a fool. Instead of speaking out loud and strong for peasant proprietorship, I should be thinking all the time of the three peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood—George Corey, Charles Narroway, and Billy Hoare, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most underhand and generally despicable rascals I have ever met. Were a resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the townspeople back on to the land, I should say in support that while it is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it is yet worse to see people like Prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. I should want to tell the audience all about Prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told me to go to the devil when I begged him not to build his abominable house where it would spoil the view: and then I should want to add a few details about his personal habits which I am afraid would cause the ladies to walk out of the room. And I should wind up by saying, amid the derisive laughter of the audience, that one reason, at all events, why the real peasants go into the towns is to escape from slavery to these pinchbeck fellows who come out of the towns. I should want to quote—but I am afraid my courage would have already broken down—what Jeremy once said to me:—"The Dook—when did you ever hear of any man going into the town as worked on his estate? But as for this 'ere Prendergast, I wonder the very pigs stop in his stye."

Undoubtedly it was due to Jeremy's influence that I came to appreciate this side of the matter. He also taught me to regard the tenant farmer as superior to all other varieties of his class. I know it is wrong-headed, generalising from a particular case and all that—but I would rather be wrong-headed with Jeremy, who took a back-view of everything, than right-headed with some forward spirits who treat the land as a corpus vile for political experiments. And what logical mind could resist arguments like the following, back-views though they be?

"It takes two, sir," said Jeremy, "for to handle the land. A nobleman to own it, and a farmer to cultivate it. There's nothing that gives you confidence like having a real gentleman behind you—and the Dook's a real gentleman if ever there was one. And you want confidence in farming—and that's what these 'ere Radicals don't see. I don't want none o' their safeguards! Give me the Dook—he's safeguard enough for me! And what safeguard have you when fellers like Prendergast begin buying up the land? Look at his tenants—not a real farmer among 'em, no, and not one as can make both ends meet. These little landlords are the men they ought to shoot at, not the big 'uns. Now isn't it a wonderful thing that my family and the Dook's has kept step with one another for a matter of two hundred years? Eight Dooks in that time and eight Jeremys—one Jeremy to each Dook! But who'll ever keep step with Prendergast? Who'll ever want to? Why, I wouldn't be seen walking down the street with him, no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds. And if he was to offer me his best farm rent-free to-morrow, I'd tell him to go and boil hisself.

"No, sir," he continued, "it don't pay to own the land you farm; and don't you believe them as tells you it does. Leastways, it pays a sight better to farm under a good landlord. Them as can't make farming pay under a landlord, can't make it pay at all. Now look at me and then look at Charley Shott. Me and Charley started the same year, him with 400 acres of his own, and me with 380 acres under the Dook, rented all round at twenty-eight shillings an acre. And where are we both now after thirty years? Why, if Charley's land, and all he's made on it, and all he's put into it, were set at auction to-morrow, I could buy him up twice over! And me paying over five hundred pounds a year rent for thirty years, and him not paying a penny. How does that come about? Well, you're not a farmer, and you wouldn't understand if I told you. But I'll tell you one thing as perhaps you can understand. It hurts the land to break it up. And it hurts the land still more to sell it. Now I dare say you never heard of that before."

I confessed that I had not.

"Well, it's a fact. When you break land up it won't keep. It goes like rotten apples: first a bit goes rotten here and then a bit there; and the rottenness spreads and runs together. And as to selling, I tell you there's something in the land as knows when you're goin' to sell it, and loses heart. I've seen the same thing in 'osses. It takes the land longer to get used to a new master than it does a 'oss; and there's some land as never will.

"No, sir, I say again, if you want to make farming pay, take a farm on a big estate, one that's never been broke up and's never likely to be, one that's been in the same hands for hundreds o' years, one that's never been shaken up and messed with and slopped all over with lawyer's ink, and made sour with lawyer's lies. Never mind if the rent's a bit stiffish. Rent never bothered me."