‘Did you ever speak to him?’
‘Oh no. You mustn’t speak to them; if you speak to them, they’ll fly at you.’
In winter, the men were allowed to grub up the roots of timber that had been thrown, and take the wood home for their own use; this kept them in fuel the winter through without buying any. ‘But they don’t get paid for that work.’ She considered it quite a hardship that they were not paid for taking a present. Cottage people do look at things in such a curious crooked light! A mother grumbled because the vicar had not been to see her child, who was ill. Now, she was not a church-goer, and cared nothing for the Church or its doctrines—that was not it—she grumbled so terribly because ‘it was his place to come.’
A lady went to live in a village for health’s sake, and having heard so much of the poverty of the farmer’s man, and how badly his family were off, thought that she should find plenty who would be glad to pick up extra shillings by doing little things for her. First, she wanted a stout boy to help to draw her Bath-chair, while the footman pushed behind, it being a hilly country. Instead of having to choose between half-a-dozen applicants, as she expected, the difficulty was to discover anybody who would even take such a job into consideration. The lads did not care about it; their fathers did not care about it; and their mothers did not want them to do it. At one cottage there were three lads at home doing nothing; but the mother thought they were too delicate for such work. In the end, a boy was found, but not for some time. Nobody was eager for any extra shilling to be earned in that way. The next thing was somebody to fetch a yoke or two of spring-water daily. This man did not care for it, and the other did not care for it; and even one who had a small piece of ground and kept a donkey and water-butt on wheels for the very purpose, shook his head. He always fetched water for folk in the summer when it was dry, never fetched none at that time of year—he could not do it. After a time, a small shopkeeper managed the yoke of water from the spring for her—his boy could carry it; the labourers could not. He was comparatively well to do, yet he was not above an extra shilling.
This is one of the most curious traits in the character of cottage folk—they do not care for small sums; they do not care to pick up sixpences. They seem to be afraid of obliging people—as if to do so, even to their own advantage, would be against their personal honour and dignity. In London, the least trifle is snapped up immediately, and there is a great crush and press for permission to earn a penny, and that not in very dignified ways. In the country, it is quite different. Large fortunes have been made out of matches; now your true country cottager would despise such a miserable fraction of a penny as is represented by a match. I heard a little girl singing—
Little drops of water, little grains of sand.
It is these that make oceans and mountains; it is pennies that make millionaires. But this the country-man cannot see. Not him alone either; the dislike to little profits is a national characteristic, well marked in the farmer, and indeed in all classes. I, too, must be humble, and acknowledge that I have frequently detected the same folly in myself, so let it not be supposed for an instant that I set up as a censor; I do but delineate. Work for the cottager must be work to please him; and to please him, it must be the regular sort to which he is accustomed, which he did beside his father as a boy, which his father did, and his father before him; the same old plough or grub-axe, the same milking, the same identical mowing, if possible in the same field. He does not care for any newfangled jobs: he does not recognise them, they have no locus standi—they are not established. Yet he is most anxious for work, and works well, and is indeed the best labourer in the world. But it is the national character. To understand a nation, you must go to the cottager.
The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager, the character stands out in the coarsest relief; in the cottager, you get to ‘bed-rock,’ as the Americans say; there’s the foundation. Character runs upwards, not downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the cottager, but the nature of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat. The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the mansion. The labouring man cannot quickly alter his ways. Can the manufacturer? All alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster visits their persistence. It is English human nature.