AN OUTCAST--WILTSHIRE
Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town upon a stream that
waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. These
are the last shops I am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs
to me that I should like to taste lardy cakes--which I last bought
in Wroughton fifteen years ago--before I leave the county. Richard
Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty
years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs
of larded pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the
best essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which were
permitted to be baked with them. In “Amaryllis at the Fair” they are
mentioned with some indignity as a ploughboy’s delicacy. My lips water
for them, and at the first bakery in ---- I ask for some. The baker
tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white-haired and
white-bearded man with an expression of unctuous repose, assuredly
a pillar of his chapel and possibly its treasurer, and though he
himself will, by his own telling, have no more lardy cakes until
the next morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his
fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of dough for all his
conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and am rewarded for my disbelief
by four lardy cakes for threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his
accursed threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time,
have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision of much
pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that one is enough at a
time, and that four will, therefore, take a man quite a long way upon
the roads of England.
* * * * *
At the next inn three labourers and the landlord are heated in
conversation about some one not present.
“Quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip leans against the
counter, “’tis the third time this week that a tramp has been to his
door, and by the looks of them they didn’t call for naught.”
“One of them didn’t, I know,” says the landlord. “He came in here once
and asked for a job and left without a drink, but after he’d been to
Stegbert’s Cottage he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild.
And I heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights running in
that rough patch behind the house. Don’t you think the parson ought to
hear of that? And what does he do for a living? He looks poor enough
himself.”
“I don’t know. Mr. Jones is a kind-hearted fellow. He stopped my
youngest in the street the other day and gave her a penny and measured
her hair, and told her she’d have a yard of it some day. They tell me
he hasn’t a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not even
a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t a watch or a clock.
What does he do with himself?”
“I reckon he’s mad,” says the third, chuckling, “and I don’t mind if he
is. My old dog doesn’t need feeding at home since he’s been here. He
doesn’t eat no meat himself neither. The widow Nash was reckoning it
up, and she says he spends four shillings a week----”
“And a shilling here regular,” interjects the landlord.
“On groceries, including one-and-six for tobacco. He has four loaves,
and I know ‘Kruger’ must have more than half of them.”
“And every other week he buys a postal order for two shillings and a
penny stamp----”
“Pint of mild, mister,” says a tall blear-eyed man who comes in, meekly
followed by a small woman, dusty and in rags but neat, to whom he
offers the tankard after nearly draining it himself.
“Nice weather,” he ventures, smacking his lips.
“Yes,” says the landlord discouragingly, and the carter leaves.
“Everybody seems to be gone to the flower show,” continues the
intruder, “and that’s where I’m going” (here he looks at his boots),
“but the best way for sore feet is three days in a tap-room in some
good sawdust.”
The wife sighs.
“The fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says her husband to
the company, “is a cousin of mine twice removed, and I have done a bit
in the show line myself. It’s a rum business. Better than working in a
brewery stables, though. Me and my mate had to go because we got up so
early that we burnt too many candles.”
The mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, and one says--
“They say them fat women eats hardly anything at all.”
“Very small eater is Daisy. But you see her food does her good. None of
it’s wasted.”
“That’s it. Her food agrees with her.”
The wife sighs.
“Now there’s my missus here,” says the husband. “She was one of these
pretty gallus dancing-girls who get their fifteen shillings a week. Her
food don’t nourish her. Now my brother used to laugh in publics for a
pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint to stop.”
“Oh, I can laugh _after_ a pint,” says the wife, “but then I could just
as easy cry, I worries so. There’s many a aching heart goes up and down
that Great Western Railway in the express trains.”
“I never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy mouth, short
pipe, and head straight up behind from his neck.
“Quite right,” says the husband. “My old girl here lives on the fat of
the land and is always thin. Her food don’t nourish her. There’s more
harm done in the world by a discontented gut than anything else. I
think of asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”
“Like Mr. Jones over there,” says one of the labourers.
“Mr. Jones? What, my friend Mr. William Jones?” asks the tall man.
“Is he a friend of yours?” asks the landlord, curiosity overpowering
his natural caution with a man who is selling spectacles at a shilling
a pair.
“He is, and I don’t mind letting any one know it. I’m very glad to see
him settled down. He’s the only one along the road who hasn’t gone to
the flower show to-day.” Here the tall man calls for another tankard,
which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to the small
neat woman behind him. Pleased to be civilly used, and warmed by the
liquor, he tells the story of his friend, the little woman helping him
out, and landlord and labourers adding some touches; and Mr. Jones
himself completed the picture during my few days in the village.
The man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the beggar satisfied
away, and made presents to the children, and lived on six ounces of
tobacco a week, is a native of Zennor in Cornwall. “Wonderful place
for pedlars is Cornwall. The towns are so few and far between that
the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when you do
call you are sure of the best of treatment.” He was apprenticed to a
shoemaker in a town in South Devon, and for a time practised his trade
there as an assistant. He was very clever at boxing and wrestling,
and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a quarrel. But he
was a queer youth and took violent likes and dislikes to men, and one
day he dropped a boot and went out into the street and took a young
gentleman by the arm and said to him: “Excuse me, sir, you have passed
this shop for five years nearly every day and I can’t stand it any
longer.” Whereupon he gave that young gentleman a beating. He was sent
to prison; he lost his employment and went to sea. And at sea or else
in foreign countries he stayed six years. He left the sea only because
he broke an arm which had at length to be amputated above the elbow.
He was a changed man and many thought then that he was mad. When he
left the hospital it was December and bitter weather: he had only five
shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. Every day for a week
he bought three loaves of bread and went out and fed the birds with
them. When that week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and
there he stayed until the spring. It was there that he fell in with
the tall man who helped to tell his tale. They left together and
for some time he almost kept the two by begging, his lack of an arm
ensuring his success. But he was not altogether to his companion’s
taste, nevertheless. He would stop and smoke a pipe and admire the view
when he was miles from anywhere and their object was to reach a town
and find enough money to pay for lodgings. He would stand by a hedge,
content for an hour to disentangle the bryony strands that were in
danger of straying to the road, and to restore them to the hazel and
thorn where their fellows ramped. He was willing to be foster-father to
half the helpless fledglings that he found on the roadside. Sleeping
one night in a barn he could not be persuaded to leave until he had
decided whether it was better to kill a spider who had a great appetite
for flies or to leave it to Fate. Several he rescued from the web
and then out of pity for the spider brought it flies already dead;
but finding that these were not to its taste he left the difficulty
unsolved and went sadly on his way. Almost equal to his pitifulness was
his dislike of work and his moral cowardice. Nothing could persuade him
to do any work, and such a coward was he that if he failed at the first
house where he offered his laces for sale he would not try again in
that village or town. Yet he did not scruple to steal--even with a hint
of physical violence--if he needed anything which chance presented to
him in another man’s possession: but he stole only necessaries, having
none of the acquisitiveness which is more common in their victims than
in thieves. Few men use leisure as well as he; perhaps no man was ever
idle with less harm to his fellows. The rich could have learned many
lessons at his feet: they must always be shooting or driving furiously
or meddling with politics or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept
out of harm, however rich. How well this man would have employed money:
he would have given it away!
By and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent gazings into
their brown eyes as they stared at him by a stile still further reduced
his necessities--he would touch no meat; so that his companion, finding
him no longer of much use in spite of his possession of but one arm,
left him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of time. It
was now that Jones remembered with horror a scene which had slumbered
in his mind with the fear which it originally roused in youth. He and
other boys were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall
of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the skinning and
the cutting up, until their ears became familiar with the groans,
the screams, the gurglings, the squelchings in the half-darkness of
candle-light, the blood and white faces and the knife. But one day
there was led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the
May pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy hoofs to the tips
of the horns that swayed as she walked. Her breath made, as it were, a
sacred space about her as the light of a human face will do. She stood
quiet but uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous
place, into which light only came in bars through a cobwebbed lattice
and fell that day upon her white face, leaving in darkness the tall
butcher and the imbecile assistant who held the rope by which the
animal’s head was drawn down to the right level for a blow. The men
were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they finished their
talk about Home Rule. Then the idiot tried to put her into the right
position, but for a time could not get her to see that her head must
be drawn tight and somewhat askew against the oaken pillar. He only
succeeded by patting her flanks and saying gently as if to a girl:
“Come along, Daisy!” She lowed soft and bowed her head; the blow fell;
she rolled to the ground and the butcher once more let loose the heavy
scent of blood. The wholesome pretty beast, the familiar “Come along,
Daisy!” and the blow and the scent came often into Jones’ mind. He
ate no meat, but made no attempt to proselytize; he simply retreated
deeper and deeper into his childlike love of Nature. The birds and
the flowers and the creeping and running things he seemed to regard
as little happy, charming, undeveloped human beings, looking down on
them with infinite tenderness and a little amusement; with them alone
was he quite at home. Nature, as she presented herself to his simple
senses, was but a fragrant, many-coloured, exuberant, chiefly joyous
community, with which most men were not in harmony. Silent for days and
thinking only “green thoughts” under the branches of the wood, he came
to demand, unconsciously, that there should be such a harmony. But he
loved Nature also because she had no ambiguity, told no lies, uttered
no irony. Sitting among flowers by running water he wore an expression
of blessed satisfaction with his company which is not often seen at
the friendliest table. He drew no philosophy from Nature, no opinions,
ideas, proposals for reform, but only the wisdom to live, happily and
healthily and simply, himself.
I dare say modernity was in his blood, but no man seemed to belong less
to our time. Of history and science he knew nothing, of literature
nothing; he had to make out the earth with his own eyes and heart. He
had not words for it, but he felt that whatever he touched was God.
No myth or religion had any value to him. There were no symbols for
him to use. The deities he surmised or smelt or tasted in the air or
upon the earth had neither name nor shape. Had he been able to think,
he was the man to put our generation on the way to a new mythology.
For all I know, he had the vision, the power of the seer, without
the power of the prophet. A little more and perhaps he would have
invaded Christendom as St. Paul invaded Heathendom. Yet I think he
was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye untroubled
by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for
example, the musing man can see nothing before him but a mist, but
if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become
visible. So this man saw with a clearness as of Angelico, and in his
memory violets and roses, trees and faces were as clear as if within
his brain were another sun to light them. He had but to close his
eyes to see these things, an innumerable procession of days and their
flowers and their birds in the sky or on the bough. And this he had at
no cost. He employed only such labour as was needed to make his bread
and occasionally clothes and a pipe. Nor did he merely ask alms of
Nature and Civilization. He paid back countless charities to flower
and bird and child and poorer men, and there was nothing against him
of pain or sorrow or death inflicted. And as he was without religion
so he was without patriotism. He had no country, knew nothing of men
and events. Asked by a person who saw him idle and did not observe his
defect, whether he would not like to do something for his country, he
replied: “I have no country like you, sir. I own nothing; my people
never did, that I know. I admire those that do, for I have been in many
a country when I was a sailor, but never a one to beat England, let
alone the West Country when it’s haymaking time.”
He continued to beg with a free conscience, and was always willing to
give away all that he had to one in more need. And now chance found
him out and gave him ten shillings a week. He rented a cottage in this
village, weeded his flower-borders, but let his vegetable-plots turn
into poppy-beds. Sometimes he wearied of his monotonous meals; he would
then fast for a day or two, giving his food to the birds and mice,
until his hearty appetite returned....
He did not stay long in the village. He was shy and suspicious of men,
and except by the younger children he was not liked. He set out on his
travels again, and is still on the road or--unlike most tramps--on the
paths and green lanes, the simplest, kindest, and perhaps the wisest
of men, indifferent to mobs, to laws, to all of us who are led aside,
scattered and confused by hollow goods, one whom the last day of his
full life will not find in a whirlpool of affairs, but ready to go--an
outcast.