Bettesworth, the old labouring man, who in the decline of his strength
found employment in my garden and entertained me with his talk, never
knew that he had been made the subject of a book. To know it would
have pleased him vastly, and there is something tragical in the
reflection that he had to wear through his last weary months without
the consolation of the little fame he had justly earned; and yet it
would have been a mistake to tell him of it. His up-bringing had not
fitted him for publicity. On the contrary, there was so much danger
that self-consciousness would send him boastfully drinking about the
parish, and make him intolerable to his familiars and useless to any
employer, that, instead of confessing to him what I had done, I took
every precaution to keep him in ignorance of it, and sought by leaving
him in obscurity to preserve him from ruin.
Obscure and unsuspicious he continued his work, and his pleasant
garrulity went on in its accustomed way. Queer anecdotes came from him
as plentifully as ever, and shrewd observations. Now it would be of
his harvesting in Sussex that he told; now, of an adventure with a
troublesome horse, or an experience on the scaffolding of a building;
and again he would gossip of his garden, or of his neighbours, or of
the old village life, or would discuss some scrap of news picked up at
the public-house. And as this went on month after month, although I
had no intention of adding to the first book or writing a second on
the same lines, still it happened frequently that some fragment or
other of Bettesworth's conversation took my fancy and was jotted down
in my note-book. But almost until the end no definite purpose informed
me what to preserve and what to leave. The notes were made, for the
most part, under the influence of whim only.
Towards the end, however, a sort of progression seemed to reveal
itself in these haphazard jottings. His age was telling heavily upon
Bettesworth, and symptoms of the inevitable change appeared to have
been creeping unawares into my careless memoranda of his talk. I do
not know when I first noticed this: it probably dawned upon me very
slowly; but that it did dawn is certain, and in that perception I had
the first crude vision of the present volume. I might not aim to make
another book after the pattern of the first, grouping the materials as
it pleased me for an artistic end; but by reproducing the notes in
their proper order, and leaving them to tell their own tale, it should
be possible to engage as it were the co-operation of Nature herself,
my own part being merely that of a scribe, recording at the dictation
of events the process of Bettesworth's decay.
To this idea, formed a year or so before Bettesworth's death, I have
now tried to give shape. Unfortunately, the scribe's work was not well
done. Things that should have been written down prove to have been
overlooked; and although in the first few chapters I have gone back to
a much earlier period than was originally intended, and have preserved
the chronological order all through, the hoped-for sense of
progression is too often wanting. It existed in my mind, in the
memories which the notes called up for me, rather than in
Bettesworth's recorded conversations. Much explanatory comment,
therefore, which I should have preferred to omit, has been introduced
in order to give continuity to the narrative.
Bettesworth is spoken of throughout the book as an old man; and that
is what he appeared to be. But in fact he was aged more by wear and
tear than by years. When he died, a nephew who arranged the funeral
caused the age of seventy-three to be marked on his coffin, but I
think this was an exaggeration. The nephew's mother assured me at the
time that Bettesworth could have been no more than sixty-six. She was
his sister-in-law, having married his elder brother, and so had some
right to an opinion; and yet probably he was a little older than she
supposed. It is true that sixty-six is also the age one gets for him,
computing it from evidence given in one chapter of this book; but then
there is another chapter which, if it is correct, would make him
sixty-seven. Against these estimates a definite statement is to be
placed. On the second of October, 1901, Bettesworth told me that it
was his birthday, and that he was sixty-four; according to which, at
his death, nearly four years later, he must have been close upon
sixty-eight. And this, I am inclined to think, was his true age; at
any rate I cannot believe that he was younger.
At the same time, it must be allowed that his own evidence was not
quite to be trusted. A man in his position, with the workhouse waiting
for him, will not make the most of his years to an employer, and I
sometimes fancied that Bettesworth wished me to think him younger than
he was. But it is quite possible that he was not himself certain of
his own age. I have it from his sister-in-law that both his parents
died while he was still a child, and that he, with his brothers and
sisters, was taken, destitute, to the workhouse. Thence, I suppose, he
was rescued by that uncle, who kept a travelling van; and the man who
carried the boy to fairs and racecourses, and thrashed him so savagely
that at last he ran away to become Farmer Barnes's plough-boy, was not
a person likely to instruct him very carefully about his age.
The point, however, is of no real importance. A labourer who has at
least the look of being old: thin, grey-eyed, quiet, with bent
shoulders and patient though determined expression of face--such is
the Bettesworth whose last years are recorded in these chapters; and
it does not much matter that we should know exactly how many years it
took to reduce him to this state.