OLD-FASHIONED TIMES
The road curves gently but goes almost east and west; on the north side
is a bank surmounted by dense thorns; on the south is a low hedge,
over which can be seen two broad meadows, with oaks here and there,
running up in shining bays among tall woods, and above and beyond
those woods several wooded ridges, hunched and blue, on the last of
them a windmill like a stag’s antlered head that somehow hints at
the sea beyond. His back thrust into the northern hedge, an old man
leans all the year through, whenever the faint sun draws him forth,
or he (as it seems) draws forth the sun, for when the sun is out he
is there, and he moves round the curve of the road as the sun moves.
Coral-faced, white-haired, he is still straight and tall, though his
eyes, that resemble shellfish, seem dissolving in rheum, and his face
is stamped with wrinkles like brookside mud where wagtails have played.
Apollo, when he disguised himself as an old man, must have looked so.
Most of all he loves to lean at the corner from which the windmill is
clearliest seen; and thither he looks, though he cannot see it, with a
serene satisfaction. For not only did he pass his best manhood close to
that hill, but there, as he joyfully recalls, he once climbed an ash
tree for a sparrowhawk’s nest, and in descending, the miller wrapped a
stinging whip about his legs, so that he fell violently and in so doing
broke the miller’s nose; and that is why he looks towards the windmill
affectionately.
What times those were! Wages were low, but then a labourer got many
things cheap which others got dear; for the making of a linen smock he
paid a woman half-a-crown, while a farmer had to pay four shillings,
and the smocking was the same. Also, in his worst days, if he and his
family had nothing on the table but turnip and bread, he had given
away two hundred seed potatoes to a man who praised them. Besides,
those were the “old-fashioned times,” and in fifty or sixty years of
toil, suffering and, at length, some leisure, he has proved to himself
that they were good. “Some think,” said a passer-by to him, “that the
old-fashioned times were better than these?”
“Think!” said he, “I know they were.” For surely they were, since it
was then that he used to drive a glorious coach twice a week to London
and now he does not; and in those days there were “good people” in
the little town under the mill, and you knew who they were and their
grandfathers too, but who are they now?
And yet, he says, there used to be a great deal less pride. In his
young days the farmers and their sons went to church and sang in
the choir in their clean white smocks; but now the church is like a
gentleman’s conservatory. “And, lord! where are the gentlemen now?
Many a gentleman looks like an ordinary man about here, and there’s
many an ordinary man looks like a gentleman. That means a lot of
awkwardness for those that care. Now, in the old-fashioned times, we
knew a gentleman as soon as we could walk. There was the old squire!
He used to expect us to sing carols outside his windows on Christmas
Eve! then he would ask us into the hall and give us good mulled ale and
a shilling apiece--and how he did give it! Not like a fellow putting
a halfpenny into the collection, nor like your good old lady’s giving
you a pair of gloves too small for you and a tract, as much as to say
it is more blessed to give than to receive; but his look was as good as
his shilling and made you want to sing, and I believe the old gentleman
could no more have done without us than we could do without him.”
He is simply a memory with a voice, both of them slightly aided by a
present of whisky from an old employer, and in the sun of April he
sprouts like any cottager’s garden with alyssum and tulips.
Food is a great subject with him, and especially roast pork, from which
it is perhaps fair to conclude that it was not often to be had. One
bout of it he often recalls. He was still in his prime, a big man of
fifty, and though he had been threshing all the morning--“it is a good
many ups and downs of the flail to a pound of pork,” he says--he had
eaten no food and he had none by him and there was none in the house.
Presently hunger so far mastered him that he stopped work and took a
walk round the farmyard. There he saw a fat pig lying on his side,
heavy and making bacon rapidly. In a short time he had laid his plans:
lifting up his flail he began to thresh the pig, and shouting above
its screams: “Son of a fool, I’ll teach you to eat my dinner.” Nor did
he cease to beat the pig and to upbraid it for stealing his dinner
until the farmer came out and, pitying his case, sent him out a dish
of roast pork to make amends. Then he tells a story to celebrate the
incomparable joys of such a dish. An old woman had died and two young
wives came to lay her out. After doing their work, they sat down on the
bed, talking of many matters. Soon they fell to discussing pork. One
said that it was best in the middle of the day; the other that it was
best at night; and the debate was hot and threatened to be long, when
the corpse rose straight up in the bed and said in a gentle voice that
it was good at all times, then lay back in peace and never moved again.
But it was wonderful how much could be done without pork. He and two
other men had mowed a seven-acre field of grass, all but a bit,--and a
good crop,--in one long day, eating nothing but bread and cheese, and
drinking two gallons of new ale apiece. They began at half-past two
in the morning, one of them having cleared the edges the night before
with an old scythe, because the ground was rough there with sticks
and stones. They moved in _échelon_ up the field, he as the strongest
mower coming last in the row, so that he could always keep them up to
their work; for they had to keep ahead of him lest his swathes should
fall over their unmown grass. At five they had the first meal, hardly
sitting down to it, for fear of losing time; then again at nine they
ate, and so on through the day. The rule for eating and drinking was
never to wait until they were really hungry or thirsty, thus avoiding
the necessity for a heavy meal and some rest. At first, he said,
they talked all the time, especially when they were carrying back
their scythes to begin a fresh swathe at the bottom of the field; but
gradually their talk grew less and less, and they finished in silence
at half-past nine. He recalled with pride that when he first mowed
barley, being a strong man, he used to take three more drills in his
swing than the other man, but in a day’s work he had lost ground and he
had to give up the conceit.
But he is proudest of his coaching years and especially of one day.
It was a very fine April. The snakebirds or wrynecks were screaming
all along the road as he set out. The horses were all shining, the
white windmills were turning with mad, downward plunges “fit to make
you mad.” So at the first stop, which was ten minutes, off he went,
and sure enough in the first shaw he came to he heard the cuckoo, and
as there was a big shallow pond in the heart of the trees, all warm
with sun, he stripped and bathed, rejoicing all the time with the
thought that he would be able to drive the horses as fast as he liked
to make up for the delay. He could have ridden a cow that day. He
felt so proud that he wanted to run down some foxhounds that crossed
the road before him, and all the way to London the horses’ hoofs beat
out his name--“Peter Durrant! Peter Durrant!”--as they had never done
before. Nowadays, he says, there is not a pair of horses, that does
not clatter: “Poor pluck to-day! Poor pluck to-day!” which is what a
team of plough horses used to sing in his day, as they went home in
the afternoon. But so strong is his belief in the old days--to which
he belonged--from which he is an exile in a foreign field--that he is
never sad as he sits in the sun. He condescends to live on with just
such an air as when an old man lays his hand on a boy’s shoulder and
encourages him. From his conspicuous life he is rather well known,
and it happened once that a poet with a command of large margins once
made some verses after some misfortune had befallen him and recited
them to the old man by the wayside. “That is wonderful,” said Peter,
“wonderful! How ever did you think of all those things about a poor old
man like me? But ’tis lucky, sir, that you were not the sufferer, or
those beautiful things would never have been written, for I could never
have thought of them myself.”
For the rest, he collects herbs and with the help of Culpeper and
some little experiment concocts fragrant ointments and dark, painful
draughts in which a dozen flavours conflict; nor has he ever killed
a man: he takes them himself. He will bury his nose in a fragrant
posy brought home by the children and say gravely, and I think with
some dark wisdom, “Why, they must be good for something,” and deeply
inhaling, he continues, “At least they are good for old age.” And his
own old age he attributes to the diet of living tadpoles which he used
against a decline, fifty years ago.