I drown twa.”
If you look at the graves in a country churchyard, of the two outside generations, that is, of old people and young children, nearly all will have found their “bane” in December and January.
With us in the West, the thing which kills the plants in our gardens also kills the villagers, very old or very young: excessive wet, namely, followed by hard frost or murderous wind. The other day we had a day of warm drenches, drifting sheets of rain, a whole day of them, the wind in the West. About midnight, the weathercock chopped round to meet a whirl-blast from the East: the sky cleared, and it froze like mad. I went round my borders in the morning, quaking at the heart. The garden was like a battle-field. Nothing can cope with that. The babies get pneumonia, the veterans bronchitis, the sexton is busy; every day you hear the passing bell. Yet whether it is because we observe punctually the Laws of Being, or (as the Dean will have it) in spite of it, the facts are that the supply of babies never fails, and that we live to a great age. The oldest gardener I know—I shouldn’t wonder if he were the oldest gardener in the world—lives in this village. Eighty-nine.
“I know a girl—she’s eighty-five”—
That was Lord Houghton’s way of beginning a poem on Mrs. Grote. My gardener beats her by four years. To and fro, four times a day, he walks his half-mile—to work and back. I saw him the other day half-way up a cherry-tree, sawing off a dead branch. Mrs. Grote again:
“She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”
To look at his sapless limbs, you might think he could saw off one of them and take no hurt. But not at all. Life is high in him still. His eye is bright, his step is brisk. We have many octagenarians, but I believe he is the patriarch of our village. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in Bath, beats him by a year.
We are stoics, without knowing what that means down here. Whatever our years tell us we make no account of them, or of ailments, or physical discomfort; and as for Death, the Antick, however close he stand to us—the Grizzly One, we call him—we take no notice of him, so long as we can move about. The end is not long in coming when a man must keep the house, or his bed. Then, so sure as fate, he will stiffen at the joints and come out no more to enjoy the lingering of the light. The chalk, which he has been inhaling and absorbing all his life, will harden in him, and, he will tell you, “time’s up.” Want of imagination, that fine indifference to fate, perhaps—but I don’t know. I have never been able to deny imagination to our country folk. The faculty takes various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition, which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above everything else. One of those laws says, Work. And work we do, until we drop. There is a noble creature lying now, I fear, under a stroke which will prevent her doing another hand’s turn of work. Her children are all about her bed; I saw one of them this morning before she went there. She confessed, with tears, the anguish it would be to see her mother lying idle. Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day without work in her children’s recollection. She had never been in bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken, and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well Shakespeare knew that world: