HAMPSHIRE--AN UMBRELLA MAN
A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, especially one I
know, whom first I met some Augusts ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon
had sprinkled the quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men
and white-dressed women, the older married couples and their trains
of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most straightforward
paths, the younger, with one child or none, choosing rather the green
lanes, while the lovers and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the
footpaths across which more than one year’s growth of hazel had spread,
so that the shortest of the maids must stoop. Many showers following a
dry season made miles of the country as clean and fragrant as a garden.
Honeysuckle and privet were in every hedge with flowers that bring a
thrill of summer bridals on their scent. The brisk wind was thymy from
the Downs. The ragwort was in its glory; it rose tall as a man in one
straight leap of dark-foliaged stem, and then crowned itself in the
boldest and most splendid yellows derived from a dark golden disc and
almost lemon rays; it was as if Apollo had come down to keep the flocks
of a farmer on these chalk hills and his pomp had followed him out of
the sky. A few birds still sang; one lark now and then, a cirl-bunting
among the topmost haws of a thorn, chiffchaffs in the bittersweet and
hazel of the little copses.
There was apparently comfort, abundance and quiet everywhere. They
were seen in the rickyards where grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood
around ancient walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in
their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little patches of
flowery turf by the roadside and at corners were brighter and warmer
than ever, as the black bees and the tawny skipper butterflies flew
from bloom to bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most unctuous
of all in their expression of the ceremonious leisure of the day and
the maturity of the season were the cart-horses. They leaned their
large heads benignly over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut
flanks were firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless;
now and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes into
the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone and were of girth
sufficient to make a girdle for the lightest of the maids passing by.
Sunday with not too strict a rod of black and white ruled the land and
made it all but tedious except in the longest of the green lanes, which
dipped steeply under oaks to a brook muffled in leaves and rose steeply
again, a track so wet in spring--and full of the modest golden green of
saxifrage flowers--that only the hottest Sunday ever saw it disturbed
except by carter and horses. In a hundred yards the oak-hidden windings
gave the traveller a feeling of reclusion as if he were coiled in a
spool; very soon a feeling of possession ripened into one of armed
tyranny if another’s steps clattered on the stones above. Sometimes in
a goodly garden a straight alley of shadows leads away from the bright
frequented borders to--we know not quite whither, and perhaps, too much
delighted with half-sad reverie, never learn, smother even the guesses
of fancy, lest they should bring some old unpleasant truth in their
train; but if the fancy will thread the alley and pass the last of the
shadows it is into some such lane as this that it would gladly emerge,
to come at last upon the pure wild. It seemed that I had come upon
the pure wild in this lane, for in a bay of turf alongside the track,
just large enough for a hut and thickly sheltered by an oak, though
the south-west sun crept in, was a camp. Under the oak and at the edge
of the tangled bramble and brier and bracken was a low purple light
from those woodside flowers, self-heal and wood-betony. A perambulator
with a cabbage in it stood at one corner; leaning against it was an
ebony-handled umbrella and two or three umbrella-frames; underneath
it an old postman’s bag containing a hammer and other tools. Close by
stood half a loaf on a newspaper, several bottles of bright water,
a black pot of potatoes ready for boiling, a tin of water steaming
against a small fire of hazel twigs. Out on the sunny grass two shirts
were drying. In the midst was the proprietor, his name revealed in
fresh chalk on the side of his perambulator: “John Clark, Hampshire.”
He had spent his last pence on potatoes and had been given the cabbage.
No one would give him work on a Sunday. He had no home, no relations.
Being deaf, he did not look for company. So he stood up, to get dry and
to think, think, think, his hands on his hips, while he puffed at an
empty pipe. During his meditation a snail had crawled half-way up his
trousers, and was now all but down again. He was of middle height and
build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which
comes straight with all its twistings. His head was small and round,
almost covered by bristly grey hair like lichen, through which peered
quiet blue eyes; the face was irregular, almost shapeless, like dough
being kneaded, worn by travel, passion, pain, and not a few blows;
where the skin was visible at all through the hair it was like red
sandstone; his teeth were white and strong and short like an old dog’s.
His rough neck descended into a striped half-open shirt, to which was
added a loose black waistcoat divided into thin perpendicular stripes
by ribs of faded gold; his trousers, loose and patched and short,
approached the colour of a hen pheasant; his bare feet were partly
hidden by old black boots. His voice was hoarse and, for one of his
enduring look, surprisingly small, and produced with an effort and a
slight jerk of the head.
He was a Sussex man, born in the year 1831, on June the twenty-first
(it seemed a foppery in him to remember the day, and it was impossible
to imagine with what ceremony he had remembered it year by year, during
half a century or near it, on the roads of Sussex, Kent, Surrey and
Hampshire). His mother was a Wild--there were several of them buried
not far away under the carved double-headed tombstones by the old
church with the lancet windows and the four yews. He was a labourer’s
son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and
fagging when he enlisted at Chatham. He had kept his musket bright,
slept hard and wet, and starved on thirteenpence a day, moving from
camp to camp every two years. He had lost his youth in battle, for a
bullet went through his knee; he lay four months in hospital, and they
took eighteen pieces of bone out of his wound--he was still indignant
because he was described as only “slightly wounded” when he was
discharged after a “short service” of thirteen years. He showed his
gnarled knee to explain his crookedness. Little he could tell of the
battle except the sobbing of the soldier next to him--“a London chap
from Haggerston way. Lord! he called for his mother and his God and me
to save him, and the noise he made was worse than the firing and the
groaning of the horses, and I was just thinking how I could stop his
mouth for him when a bullet hits me, and down I goes like a baby.”
He had been on the road forty years. For a short time after his
discharge he worked on the land and lived in a cottage with his wife
and one child. The church bells were beginning to ring, and I asked him
if he was going to church. At first he said nothing, but looked down at
his striped waistcoat and patched trousers; then, with a quick violent
gesture of scorn, he lifted up his head and even threw it back before
he spoke. “Besides,” he said, “I remember how it was my little girl
died----My little girl, says I, but she would have been a big handsome
woman now, forty-eight years old on the first of May that is gone. She
was lying in bed with a little bit of a cough, and she was gone as
white as a lily, and I went in to her when I came home from reaping.
I saw she looked bad and quiet-like--like a fish in a hedge--and
something came over me, and I caught hold of both her hands in both of
mine and held them tight, and put my head close up to hers and said,
‘Now look here, Polly, you’ve got to get well. Your mother and me can’t
stand losing you. And you aren’t meant to die; such a one as you be
for a lark.’ And I squeezed her little hands, and all my nature seemed
to rise up and try to make her get well. Polly she looked whiter than
ever and afraid; I suppose I was a bit rough and dirty and sunburnt,
for ’twas a hot harvest and ’twas the end of the second week of it,
and I was that fierce I felt I ought to have had my way.... All that
night I thought I had done a wrong thing trying to keep her from dying
that way, and I tell you I cried in case I had done any harm by it....
That very night she died without our knowing it. She was a bonny maid,
that fond of flowers. The night she was taken ill she was coming home
with me from the Thirteen Acre, where I’d been hoeing the mangolds, and
she had picked a rose for her mother. All of a sudden she looks at it
and says, ‘It’s gone, it’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone, gone, gone,’
and she kept on, ‘It’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone,’ and when she got
home she ran up to her mother, crying, ‘The wild rose is broke, mother;
broke, gone, gone,’ she says, just like that,” said the old man, in a
high finical voice more like that of a bird than a child....
“Then my old woman--well, she was only a bit of a wench too; seventeen
when we were married--she took ill and died within a week after....
There was a purpose in it.... It was then the end of harvest. I spent
all my wages down at the Fighting Cocks, and then I set out to walk
to Mildenhall in Wiltshire, where my wife came from. On the way I met
a chap I had quarrelled with in Egypt, and he says to me, ‘Hullo,
Scrammy-handed Jack,’ with a sort of look, and I, not thinking what I
did, I set about him, and before I knew it he was lying there as might
be dead, and I went and gave myself up, and I don’t mind saying that I
wished I might be hanged for it. However, I did six months. That was
how I came to be in the umbrella line. I took up with a chap who did a
bit of tinkering and umbrella-mending and grinding in the roving way,
and a job of hoeing or mowing now and then. He died not so very long
after in the year of the siege of Paris, and I have been alone ever
since. Nor I haven’t been to church since, any more than a blackbird
would go and perch on the shoulder of one of those ladies with feathers
and wings and a bit of a fox in their hats.”
Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he had always
wandered, and knew the South Country between Fordingbridge and Dover
as a man knows his garden. Every village, almost every farmhouse,
especially if there were hops on the land, he knew, and could see with
his blue eyes as he remembered them and spoke their names. I never
met a man who knew England as he did. As he talked of places his eyes
were alight and turned in their direction, and his arm stretched out
to point, moving as he went through his itinerary, so that verily,
wherever he was, he seemed to carry in his head the relative positions
of all the other places where he had laboured and drunk and lit his
solitary fire. “Was you ever at H----?” he said, pointing to the Downs,
through which he seemed to see H---- itself. “General ----, that
commanded us, lived there. He died there three years ago at the age of
eighty-eight, and till he died I was always sure of a half-crown if I
called there on a Christmas Eve, as I generally managed to do.” Of any
place mentioned he could presently remember something significant--the
words of a farmer, a song, a signboard, a wonderful crop, the good
ale--the fact that forty-nine years ago the squire used to go to church
in a smock frock. All the time his face was moved with free and broad
expressions as he thought and remembered, like an animal’s face. Living
alone and never having to fit himself into human society, he had not
learnt to keep his face in a vice. He was returning--if the grave was
not too near at the age of seventy-seven--to a primeval wildness and
simplicity. It was a pleasure to see him smoke--to note how it eased
his chest--to see him spit and be the better for it. The outdoor life
had brought him rheumatism, but a clear brain also and a wild purity, a
physical cleanliness too, and it was like being with a well-kept horse
to stand beside him; and this his house was full of the scent of the
bracken growing under the oaks. Earth had not been a kind but a stern
mother, like some brawny full-bosomed housewife with many children,
who spends all her long days baking and washing, and making clothes,
and tending the sick one, and cutting bread and pouring out tea, and
cuffing one and cuddling another and listening to one’s tale, and
hushing their unanimous chatter with a shout or a bang of her enormous
elbow on the table. The blows of such a one are shrewd, but they are
not as the sweetness of her nursing voice for enduring in the memory of
bearded men and many-childed women.
Once or twice again I met him in later summers near the same place. The
last time he had been in the infirmary, and was much older. His fire
was under the dense shelf of a spruce bough in a green deserted road
worn deep in the chalk, blocked at both ends, and trodden by few mortal
feet. Only a few yards away, under another spruce, lay a most ancient
sheep who had apparently been turned into the lane to browse at peace.
She was lame in one leg, and often fed as she knelt. Her head was dark
grey and wise, her eyes pearly green and iridescent with an oblong
pupil of blackish-blue, quiet, yet full of fear; her wool was dense
but short and of a cinder grey; her dark horny feet were overgrown
from lack of use. She would not budge even when a dog sniffed at her,
but only bowed her head and threatened vainly to butt. She was huge
and heavy and content, though always all alone. As she lay there, her
wool glistening with rain, I had often wondered what those eyes were
aware of, what part she played in the summer harmonies of night and
day, the full night heavens and cloudless noon, storm and dawn, and the
long moist heat of dewy mornings. She was now shorn, and the old man
watched her as he drank the liquor in which a cabbage and a piece of
bacon had been boiled. “I often thinks,” he said, “that I be something
like that sheep ... ‘slightly wounded’ ... but not ‘short service’ now
... haha! ... left alone in this here lane to browse a bit while the
weather’s fine and folks are kind.... But I don’t know but what she is
better off. Look there,” he said, pointing to a wound which the shearer
had made in one of her nipples, where flies clustered like a hideous
flower of crape, “I have been spending this hour and more flicking
the flies off her.... Nobody won’t do that for me--unless I come in
for five shillings a week Old Age Pension. But I reckon that won’t be
for a roving body like me without a letter-box.” In the neighbouring
field a cart-horse shook herself with a noise of far-off thunder and
laughed shrilly and threw up her heels and raced along the hedge. A
bee could be seen going in and out of the transparent white flowers
of convolvulus. The horse had her youth and strength and a workless
day before her; the bee its business, in which was its life, among
sunbeams and flowers; and they were glad. The old man smacked his lips
as he drained the salty broth, tried three times to light his empty
pipe and then knocked out the ashes and spat vigorously, and took a
turn up the lane alone in the scent of the bracken.