This cottage had five windows facing us, and receiving the volleys of foul gray smoke, as a smart south-west wind drove it; and the fires being piled with diseased potato-haulm, of which there was abundance in that bad year, as well as bottomed with twitch-grass, beth-wine, cat’s-tail, and fifty other kinds of weed, and still more noxious refuse, the reek was more than any nose could stand, when even a mild puff strayed towards us. But the main and solid mass was rushing, in a flood of embodied stench, straight into the windows of that peaceful cot, penetrating sash and frame and lining. Once or twice as the cloud wisped before the wind, we seemed to catch a brief glimpse of some agitated mortal, holding up his hands in supplication, or wringing them, and applying them in anguish to his nose.
“Pile on some more, Bill, and stir them up again,” shouted Uncle Corny, with his pitchfork swinging in the thick of it. “Agricultural operations must not be suspended to suit the caprice of individuals,—as the County-court judge said, when Noakes tried to stop me from carting manure near his parlour-window. If old Harker won’t hearken, well make him sniff, eh? See the joke, Selsey Bill?”
Selsey Bill saw it, after deep reflection, and shook his long sides with a longer guffaw. “If a’ don’t sniff at this, a’ must have quare nostrils”—he was wheezing himself, as he clapped on another great dollop of rottenness, and stirred it; “I could never have bided it two minutes; though the Lord hathn’t made me too partiklar. Sure us’ll vetch ’un out this time, Maister. Here a’ coom’th, here a’ coom’th. Lookey see!”
Following his point we descried a little man, timidly opening the cottage door, and apparently testing the smells outside, to compare them with those he was quitting. He glanced at the bonfires, and shook his fist wildly; then threw his skirt over his head, and made off, as if he had smelled quite enough of this world.
“Run and get the key, Bill,” my uncle cried, as soon as he could speak for laughing; “lock the door, and bring the key to me. We’ll send for the fire-engine by-and-by, and wash down the front, and then put your wife in, and scrub the whole place out. Beat abroad the fires, men, and throw some earth upon them. That’s what I call something like an ejectment. The old rogue has paid no rent since Lady Day; though he had it dirt cheap at three and six a week, and me to pay the rates and taxes. Come, you shall have a pint of beer all round. I am sure you want something to take the taste out.”
As we went home, to have a good wash, and change our coats, I learned all the meaning of this strong measure, and felt no more pity for the tenant evicted. He had occupied this cottage for some seven years now, and although he lived so close to us and on our land, scarcely any one had exchanged ten words with him. He was of a morose and silent nature, living all alone, though he had some money, and never going out of doors when he could help it. His name was Ben Harker, and throughout the village his nickname was “Old Arkerate;” for when anything was said to him that he could pick a hole in, if it were only a remark about the weather, he would always say—“No. That isn’t arkerate.” It was said that he had lost a considerable fortune, before he came to Sunbury, by some inaccuracy in a will, or title-deeds, and thence he had taken to challenge the correctness of even the most trivial statement. My uncle had been longing for months to recover possession of his own premises; but old Harker took advantage of the obstacles richly provided by English law in such a case, and swore he would never go out without a law-suit. But he had never spent a halfpenny on repairs, though he had it so cheap through his promises; and by his own default he was thus smoked out, and the key was in the landlord’s pocket.
Mrs. Selsey Bill, mother of seventeen living children, was very fat and stumpy—as behoves a giant’s wife—and was blest with a cold in her head just now, which redeemed all her system from prejudice. The greatest philosophers assure us that all things—if there be anything—are good or bad, simply as we colour them in our own minds—that is to say, if we have minds—and to Mrs. Bill Tompkins the stench of that house was as sweet as the perfumes of Araby. She flung up the windows, from the force of habit, and not from “æsthetic preference,” and she scrubbed away with soda, and fuller’s earth, and soft soap, and bristle, and cocoa-fibre. And the next day, as soon as we had finished dinner (which we never left for nightfall, as if it were a burglary), my uncle said, “let us go and see how that place looks, after Old Arkerate has had to cut and run.”
When we got there, fat little Mrs. Tompkins was scrubbing almost as hard as ever. It is quite wrong to talk as if fat people cannot work. Many of them can, and can even carry on, by drawing on their own resources, when a lean person having hollow places down her begins to pant, and has no stuff to fill them out. She drew her breath a little, as she got up from the bucket; but neither of her hands went to her waist, because there was no such place to go to. She had three of the young ones strapped down on the floor of the room she had not yet grappled with; for her husband was of an ingenious mind, and necessity had taught him invention. Mrs. Selsey Bill stood up and faced us; she thought that we were come to say she had not done enough.
“Honourable gents,” she began with the lead, as women love to do, “it don’t look much; and you might think you got the worst of one and ninepence for a day, with the days going on for dusk at five o’clock. But when you has to find your own soap and flannels—”
“I think you have done wonders, Mrs. Tompkins;” my uncle made answer with his pleasant smile. “If I only got the best of every bargain like this, I need never be out of elbows, ma’am. Why the stairs are as white as a scraped horse-radish. May we go up and see the view from the best bedroom? Not if it will upset any of your clever doings. You are the mistress now; and we take your orders.”