collected and piled up around him in visible shape, what a vast mound
there would be beside some! If each act or stroke was represented, say by
a brick, John Brown would have stood the day before his ending by the
side of a monument as high as a pyramid. Then if in front of him could be
placed the sum and product of his labour, the profit to himself, he could
have held it in his clenched hand like a nut, and no one would have seen
it. Our modern people think they train their sons to strength by football
and rowing and jumping, and what are called athletic exercises; all of
which it is the fashion now to preach as very noble, and likely to lead
to the goodness of the race. Certainly feats are accomplished and records
are beaten, but there is no real strength gained, no hardihood built up.
Without hardihood it is of little avail to be able to jump an inch
farther than somebody else. Hardihood is the true test, hardihood is the
ideal, and not these caperings or ten minutes' spurts.
Now, the way they made the boy John Brown hardy was to let him roll about
on the ground with naked legs and bare head from morn till night, from
June till December, from January till June. The rain fell on his head,
and he played in wet grass to his knees. Dry bread and a little lard was
his chief food. He went to work while he was still a child. At half-past
three in the morning he was on his way to the farm stables, there to help
feed the cart-horses, which used to be done with great care very early in
the morning. The carter's whip used to sting his legs, and sometimes he
felt the butt. At fifteen he was no taller than the sons of well-to-do
people at eleven; he scarcely seemed to grow at all till he was eighteen
or twenty, and even then very slowly, but at last became a tall big man.
That slouching walk, with knees always bent, diminished his height to
appearance; he really was the full size, and every inch of his frame had
been slowly welded together by this ceaseless work, continual life in the
open air, and coarse hard food. This is what makes a man hardy. This is
what makes a man able to stand almost anything, and gives a power of
endurance that can never be obtained by any amount of gymnastic training.
I used to watch him mowing with amazement. Sometimes he would begin at
half-past two in the morning, and continue till night. About eleven
o'clock, which used to be the mowers' noon, he took a rest on a couch of
half-dried grass in the shade of the hedge. For the rest, it was mow,
mow, mow for the long summer day.
John Brown was dead: died in an instant at his cottage door. I could
hardly credit it, so vivid was the memory of his strength. The gap of
time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me; to me he was
still in my mind the John Brown of the hayfield; there was nothing
between then and his death.
He used to catch us boys the bats in the stable, and tell us fearful
tales of the ghosts he had seen; and bring the bread from the town in an
old-fashioned wallet, half in front and half behind, long before the
bakers' carts began to come round in country places. One evening he came
into the dairy carrying a yoke of milk, staggering, with tipsy gravity;
he was quite sure he did not want any assistance, he could pour the milk
into the pans. He tried, and fell at full length and bathed himself from
head to foot. Of later days they say he worked in the town a good deal,
and did not look so well or so happy as on the farm. In this cottage
opposite the violet bank they had small-pox once, the only case I
recollect in the hamlet--the old men used to say everybody had it when
they were young; this was the only case in my time, and they recovered
quickly without any loss, nor did the disease spread. A roomy well-built
cottage like that, on dry ground, isolated, is the only hospital worthy
of the name. People have a chance to get well in such places; they have
very great difficulty in the huge buildings that are put up expressly for
them. I have a Convalescent Home in my mind at the moment, a vast
building. In these great blocks what they call ventilation is a steady
draught, and there is no 'home' about it. It is all walls and regulations
and draughts, and altogether miserable. I would infinitely rather see any
friend of mine in John Brown's cottage. That terrible disease, however,
seemed to quite spoil the violet bank opposite, and I never picked one
there afterwards. There is something in disease so destructive, as it
were, to flowers.
The hundreds of times I saw the tall chimney of that cottage rise out of
the hill-side as I came home at all hours of the day and night! the first
chimney after a long journey, always comfortable to see, especially so in
earlier days, when we had a kind of halting belief in John Brown's
ghosts, several of which were dotted along that road according to him.
The ghosts die as we grow older, they die and their places are taken by
real ghosts. I wish I had sent John Brown a pound or two when I was in
good health; but one is selfish then, and puts off things till it is too
late--a lame excuse verily. I can scarcely believe now that he is really
dead, gone as you might casually pluck a hawthorn leaf from the hedge.
The next cottage was a very marked one, for houses grow to their owners.
The low thatched roof had rounded itself and stooped down to fit itself
to Job's shoulders; the walls had got short and thick to suit him, and
they had a yellowish colour, like his complexion, as if chewing tobacco
had stained his cheeks right through. Tobacco juice had likewise
penetrated and tinted the wall. It was cut off as it seemed by a
party-wall into one room, instead of which there were more rooms beyond
which no one would have suspected. Job had a way of shaking hands with
you with his right hand, while his left hand was casually doing something
else in a detached sort of way. 'Yes, sir,' and 'No, sir,' and nodding to
everything you said all so complaisant, but at the end of the bargain you
generally found yourself a few shillings in some roundabout manner on the
wrong side. Job had a lot of shut-up rooms in his house and in his
character, which never seemed to be opened to daylight. The eaves hung
over and beetled like his brows, and he had a forelock, a regular antique
forelock, which he used to touch with the greatest humility. There was a
long bough of an elm hanging over one gable just like the forelock. His
face was a blank, like the broad end wall of the cottage, which had no
window--at least you might think so until you looked up and discovered
one little arrow slit, one narrow pane, and woke with a start to the idea
that Job was always up there watching and listening. That was how he
looked out of his one eye so intensely cunning, the other being a wall
eye--that is, the world supposed so, as he kept it half shut, always
between the lights; but whether it was really blind or not I cannot say.
Job caught rats and rabbits and moles, and bought fagots or potatoes, or
fruit or rabbit-skins, or rusty iron: wonderful how he seemed to have
command of money. It was done probably by buying and selling almost
simultaneously, so that the cash passed really from one customer to
another, and was never his at all. Also he worked as a labourer, chiefly
piecework; also Mrs. Job had a shop window about two feet square: snuff
and tobacco, bread and cheese, immense big round jumbles and sugar, kept
on the floor above, and reached down by hand, when wanted, through the
opening for the ladder stairs. The front door--Job's right hand--was
always open in summer, and the flagstones of the floor chalked round
their edges; a clean table, clean chairs, decent crockery, an old clock
about an hour slow, a large hearth with a minute fire to boil the kettle
without heating the room. Tea was usually at half-past three, and it is a
fact that many well-to-do persons, as they came along the road hot and
dusty, used to drop in and rest and take a cup--very little milk and much
gossip. Two paths met just there, and people used to step in out of a
storm of rain, a sort of thatched house club. Job was somehow on fair
terms with nearly everybody, and that is a wonderful thing in a village,
where everybody knows everybody's business, and petty interests
continually cross. The strangest fellow and the strangest way of life,
and yet I do not believe a black mark was ever put against him; the
shiftiness was all for nothing. It arose, no doubt, out of the constant
and eager straining to gain a little advantage and make an extra penny.
Had Job been a Jew he would have been rich. He was the exact counterpart
of the London Jew dealer, set down in the midst of the country. Job
should have been rich. Such immense dark brown jumbles, such
cheek-distenders--never any French sweetmeats or chocolate or bonbons to
equal these. I really think I could eat one now. The pennies and
fourpenny bits--there were fourpenny bits in those days--that went behind
that two-foot window, goodness! there was no end. Job used to chink them
in a pint pot sometimes before the company, to give them an idea of his
great hoards. He always tried to impress people with his wealth, and
would talk of a fifty-pound contract as if it was nothing to him. Jumbles
are eternal, if nothing else is. I thought then there was not such
another shop as Job's in the universe. I have found since that there is a
Job shop in every village, and in every street in every town--that is to
say, a window for jumbles and rubbish; and if you don't know it, you may
be quite sure your children do, and spend many a sly penny there. Be as
rich as you may, and give them gilded sweetmeats at home, still they will
slip round to the Job shop.
It was a pretty cottage, well backed with trees and bushes, with a
south-east mixture of sunlight and shade, and little touches that cannot
be suggested by writing. Job had not got the Semitic instinct of keeping.
The art of acquisition he possessed to some extent, that was his right
hand; but somehow the half-crowns slipped away through his unstable left
hand, and fortune was a greasy pole to him. His left hand was too cunning
for him, it wanted to manage things too cleverly. If it had only had the
Semitic grip, digging the nails into the flesh to hold tight each
separate coin, he would have been village rich. The great secret is the
keeping. Finding is by no means keeping. Job did not flourish in his old
days; the people changed round about. Job is gone, and I think every one
of that cottage is either dead or moved. Empty.
The next cottage was the water-bailiffs, who looked after the great pond
or 'broad'. There were one or two old boats, and he used to leave the
oars leaning against a wall at the side of the house. These oars looked
like fragments of a wreck, broken and irregular. The right-hand scull was
heavy, as if made of ironwood, the blade broad and spoon-shaped, so as to
have a most powerful grip of the water. The left-hand scull was light and
slender, with a narrow blade like a marrow scoop; so when you had the
punt, you had to pull very hard with your left hand and gently with the
right to get the forces equal. The punt had a list of its own, and no
matter how you roved, it would still make leeway. Those who did not know
its character were perpetually trying to get this crooked wake straight,
and consequently went round and round exactly like the whirligig beetle.
Those who knew used to let the leeway proceed a good way and then alter
it, so as to act in the other direction like an elongated zigzag. These
sculls the old fellow would bring you as if they were great treasures,
and watch you off in the punt as if he was parting with his dearest. At
that date it was no little matter to coax him round to unchain his
vessel. You had to take an interest in the garden, in the baits, and the
weather, and be very humble; then perhaps he would tell you he did not
want it for the trimmers, or the withy, or the flags, and you might have
it for an hour as far as he could see; 'did not think my lord's steward
would come over that morning; of course, if he did you must come in,' and
so on; and if the stars were propitious, by-and-by the punt was got
afloat. These sculls were tilted up against the wall, and as you
innocently went to take one, Wauw!--a dirty little ill-tempered mongrel
poodle rolled himself like a ball to your heels and snapped his
teeth--Wauw! At the bark, out rushed the old lady, his housekeeper,
shouting in the shrillest key to the dog to lie still, and to you that
the bailiff would be there in a minute. At the sound of her shrewish
'yang-yang' down came the old man from the bank, and so one dog fetched
out the lot. The three were exactly alike somehow. Beside these diamond
sculls he had a big gun, with which he used to shoot the kingfishers that
came for the little fish; the number he slaughtered was very great; he
persecuted them as Domitian did the flies: he declared that a kingfisher
would carry off a fish heavier than itself. Also he shot rooks, once now
and then strange wild fowl with this monstrous iron pipe, and something
happened with this gun one evening which was witnessed, and after that
the old fellow was very benevolent, and the punt was free to one or two
who knew all about it. There is an old story about the stick that would
not beat the dog, and the dog would not bite the pig, and so on; and so I
am quite sure that ill-natured cur could never have lived with that
'yang-yang' shrew, nor could any one else but he have turned the gear of
the hatch, nor have endured the dog and the woman, and the constant
miasma from the stagnant waters. No one else could have shot anything
with that cumbrous weapon, and no one else could row that punt straight.
He used to row it quite straight, to the amazement of a wondering world,
and somehow supplied the motive force--the stick--which kept all these
things going. He is gone, and, I think, the housekeeper too, and the
house has had several occupants since, who have stamped down the old
ghosts and thrust them out of doors.
After this the cottages and houses came in little groups, some up crooked
lanes, hidden away by elms as if out of sight in a cupboard, and some
dotted along the brooks, scattered so that, unless you had connected them
all with a very long rope, no stranger could have told which belonged to
the village and which did not. They drifted into various tithings, and
yet it was all the same place. They were all thatched. It was a thatched
village. This is strictly accurate and strictly inaccurate, for I think
there were one or two tiled and one 'slated,' and perhaps a modern one
slated. Nothing is ever quite rigid or complete that is of man; all rules
have a chip in them. The way they builded the older thatched farmhouses
as to put up a very high wall in front and a very low one behind, and
then the roof in a general way sloped down from the high wall to the low
wall, an acre broad of thatch. These old thatched houses seemed to be
very healthy so long as the old folk lived in them in the old-fashioned
way. Thatch is believed to give an equable temperature. The air blew all
round them, and it might be said all through them; for the front door was
always open three parts of the year, and at the back the dairies were in
a continual blow. Upstairs the houses were only one room thick, so that
each wall was an outside wall, or rather it was a wall one side and
thatched the other, so that the wind went through if a window as open.
Modern houses are often built two rooms thick, so that the air does not
circulate from one side to the other. No one seemed to be ill, unless he
brought it home with him from some place where he had been visiting. The
diseases they used to have were long-lived, such as rheumatism, which may
keep a man comfortably in aches and pains forty years. My dear old
friend, however, taking them one by one, went through the lot and told me
of the ghosts. The forefathers I knew are all gone--the stout man, the
lame man, the paralysed man, the gruff old stick: not one left. There is
not one left of the old farmers, not a single one. The fathers, too, of
our own generation have been dropping away. The strong young man who used
to fill us with such astonishment at the feats he would achieve without a
thought, no gymnastic training, to whom a sack of wheat was a toy. The
strong young man went one day into the harvest-field, as he had done so
many times before. Suddenly he felt a little dizzy. By-and-by he went
home and became very ill with sunstroke; he recovered, but he was never
strong again; he gradually declined for twelve months, and next
harvest-time he was under the daisies. Just one little touch of the sun,
and the strength of man faded as a leaf. The hardy dark young man, built
of iron, broad, thick, and short, who looked as if frost, snow, and heat
were all the same to him, had something go wrong in his lung: one
twelvemonth, and there was an end. This was a very unhappy affair. The
pickaxe and the spade have made almost a full round to every door; I do
not want to think any more about this. Family changes and the pressure of
these hard times have driven out most of the rest; some seem to have
quite gone out of sight; some have crossed the sea; some have abandoned
the land as a livelihood. Of the few, the very few that still remain,
still fewer abide in their original homes. Time has shuffled them about
from house to house like a pack of cards. Of them all, I verily believe
there is but one soul living in the same old house. If the French had
landed in the mediaeval way to harry with fire and sword, they could not
have swept the place more clean.
Almost the first thing I did with pen and ink as a boy was to draw a map
of the hamlet with the roads and lanes and paths, and I think some of the
ponds, and with each of the houses marked and the occupier's name. Of
course it was very roughly done, and not to any scale, yet it was
perfectly accurate and full of detail. I wish I could find it, but the
confusion of time has scattered and mixed these early papers. A map by
Ptolemy would bear as much resemblance to the same country in a modern
atlas as mine to the present state of that locality. It is all
gone--rubbed out. The names against the whole of those houses have been
altered, one only excepted, and changes have taken place there. Nothing
remains. This is not in a century, half a century, or even in a quarter
of a century, but in a few ticks of the clock.
I think I have heard that the oaks are down. They may be standing or
down, it matters nothing to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are gone
for evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there again ruddy in spring.
I would not see them again even if I could; they could never look again
as they used to do. There are too many memories there. The happiest days
become the saddest afterwards; let us never go back, lest we too die.
There are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall and straight, and with
such massive heads, on which the sun used to shine as if on the globe of
the earth, one side in shadow, the other in bright light. How often I
have looked at oaks since, and yet have never been able to get the same
effect from them! Like an old author printed in another type, the words
are the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks have ceased to
run. There is no music now at the old hatch where we used to sit in
danger of our lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the deep
water. The barred pike that used to come up in such numbers are no more
among the flags. The perch used to drift down the stream, and then bring
up again. The sun shone there for a very long time, and the water rippled
and sang, and it always seemed to me that I could feel the rippling and
the singing and the sparkling back through the centuries. The brook is
dead, for when man goes nature ends. I dare say there is water there
still, but it is not the brook; the brook is gone like John Brown's soul.
There used to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue summer
skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me
often; they bring something to the spirit which even the trees do not. I
see clouds now sometimes when the iron grip of hell permits for a minute
or two; they are very different clouds, and speak differently. I long for
some of the old clouds that had no memories. There were nights in those
times over those fields, not darkness, but Night, full of glowing suns
and glowing richness of life that sprang up to meet them. The nights are
there still; they are everywhere, nothing local in the night; but it is
not the Night to me seen through the window.
There used to be footpaths. Following one of them, the first field always
had a good crop of grass; over the next stile there was a great oak
standing alone in the centre of the field, generally a great cart-horse
under it, and a few rushes scattered about the furrows; the fourth was
always full of the finest clover; in the fifth you could scent the beans
on the hill, and there was a hedge like a wood, and a nest of the
long-tailed tit; the sixth had a runnel and blue forget-me-nots; the
seventh had a brooklet and scattered trees along it; from the eighth you
looked back on the slope and saw the thatched houses you had left behind
under passing shadows, and rounded white clouds going straight for the
distant hills, each cloud visibly bulging and bowed down like a bag. I
cannot think how the distant thatched houses came to stand out with such
clear definition and etched outline and bluish shadows; and beyond these
was the uncertain vale that had no individuality, but the trees put their
arms together and became one. All these were meadows, every step was
among grass, beautiful grass, and the cuckoos sang as if they had found
paradise. A hundred years ago a little old man with silver buckles on his
shoes used to walk along this footpath once a week in summer, taking his
children over to drink milk at the farm; but though he set them every
time to note the number of fields, so busy were they with the nests and
the flowers, they could never be sure at the end of the journey whether
there were eight or nine. To make quite sure at last, he took with them a
pocket full of apples, one of which was eaten in each field, and so they
came to know for certain that the number of meadows was either eight or
nine, I forget which; and so you see this great experiment did not fix
the faith of mankind. Like other great truths, it has grown dim, but it
seems strange to think how this little incident could have been borne in
mind for a century. There was another footpath that led through the
peewit field, where the green plovers for evermore circle round in
spring; then past the nightingale field, by the largest maple trees that
grew in that country; this too was all grass. Another led along the water
to bluebell land; another into the coombs of the hills; all meadows,
which was the beauty of it; for though you could find wheat in plenty if
you liked, you always walked in grass. All round the compass you could
still step on sward. This is rare. Of one other path I have a faded
memory, like a silk marker in an old book; in truth, I don't want to
remember it except the end of it where it came down to the railway. So
full was the mind of romance in those days, that I used to get there
specially in time to see the express go up, the magnificent engine of the
broad gauge that swept along with such case and power to London. I wish I
could feel like that now. The feeling is not quite gone even now, and I
have often since seen these great broad-gauge creatures moving alive to
and fro like Ezekiel's wheel dream beside the platforms of Babylon with
much of the same old delight. Still I never went back with them to the
faded footpath. They are all faded now, these footpaths.