_May 13, 1896._--The Tom Durrant just mentioned was frequently spoken
of by Bettesworth, and always in a tone of warm approval. "A wonderful
quiet sort o' man," steadily "putting together the pieces," but not
assuming any airs, he managed his public-house well, and with especial
attention to the comfort of his older neighbours. "If any of the young
uns come in hollerin' about, 'twas very soon 'Outside!' with Tom.
'There is the door!' he'd say. 'I don't keep my 'ouse open for such as
you.'"
So Bettesworth has told me, more than once--perhaps not exactly in
those words.
But sometimes Bettesworth's talk was too thick with detail to be
remembered and written down as he said it in the time at my disposal;
whence it happens that I am able only to summarize an anecdote about
Durrant, which Bettesworth told with considerable relish. The publican
was the owner of two cottages which were supplied with water from a
good well--a precious thing in this village. These cottages had lately
been overhauled and enlarged--Bettesworth detailed to me all the
improvements, praising the new sculleries and sheds that had been
added--and then the tenants, as if stricken with madness, found fault
with the water-supply, and lodged a complaint with the sanitary
inspector. The inspector insisted that the well should be cleaned out.
Durrant thereupon examined the water, found it "clear as crystal,"
cleaned out the well as he was ordered to do, and--gave the tenants
notice to pay sixpence a week more for their cottages, or to quit. "So
they didn't get much by _that_," said Bettesworth approvingly.
After all, this was but a kind of parenthesis in a talk which, not
hurried, but quietly oozing out as we worked side by side in the
garden, fairly overwhelmed my memory with variety of subject and
vividness of expression. At one time it dealt with a certain road
which was to be widened--"all they beautiful trees to be cut down,
right from so-and-so to so-and-so"; at another, it discussed three
parcels of building land for sale in the vicinity, estimated their
acreage, and related the offers which had been already made for them.
From that, working all the while, Bettesworth would wander off to the
drought, and I would hear how long this or that neighbour had been
without water; how a third (whose new horse, by the way, "was turnin'
out well--but there, so do all they that comes from" a certain source,
where, however, "they works 'em too hard")--how a third neighbour was
obliged to keep his old horse almost constantly at work fetching
water, since he had twenty-two little pigs, besides other live
animals whose numbers goodness knows, and so did Bettesworth. At the
new schools, again, the water was failing; and how, and why, and what
the caretaker thought, and all about it, Bettesworth was able to
explain.
The receptivity of the man's brain was what struck me. One pictured it
pinked and patterned over with thousands of unsorted facts--legions of
them jostling one another without apparent arrangement. Yet all were
available to him; at will he could summon any one of them into his
consciousness. A modern man would have had to stop and sift and
compare them, and build theories and systems out of all that wealth of
material. Not being modern, Bettesworth did not theorize; his thoughts
were like the dust-atoms seen in a sunbeam. But though he did not
"think," still a vast common-sense somehow or other flourished in him,
and these manifold facts were its food.
_September 26, 1896._--Nor was it only of current topics that he could
talk with such fullness of detail. Getting shortly afterwards into the
reminiscent vein, he succeeded in paralyzing my memory with the tale
of things he had observed many years before in just the same
unsystematic yet thorough fashion. My hasty jottings, made afterwards,
preserve only a few points, and do not tell how any of them were
suggested. The talk was at one time of Basingstoke Fair, "where they
goes to hire theirselves for the year." Of "shepherds with a bit o'
wool in their hats, carters with a bit o' whipcord, and servant gals,"
and so on. "I went once," said Bettesworth, "when I was a nipper--went
away from Penstead; but I never got hired.... There's the place for
games, though! They carters, when they've jest took their year's
money, and be changin' 'racks,' as they calls it. 'You bin an' changed
your rack, Bill?' 'What rack be you got on to?' 'You got on for old
Farmer So-and-so?'... There they be, hollerin' about. And then they
all got their shillin', what bin hired...."
I did not stop then to consider whether this hiring shilling, and the
token in the hat, might have any relationship, in the world of old
customs, to the "King's shilling" and the bunch of ribbons of the
recruit for the army. Bettesworth was talking; and presently it was
about a certain Jack Worthington, of a neighbouring village, who was
known as "Cunnin' Jack," and played the concertina at fairs, clubs,
and so on: "Newbury Fair, Reading Fair, Basingstoke Fair"--Bettesworth
essayed to catalogue them. Cunnin' Jack "learnt it all by hisself, but
I've heared a good many--travellin' folk and the like--say as they
never heared anybody play the concertina like him. He's the on'y one
's ever I heared play the church bells--chimes, an' fire 'em, and
all--wonderful! _Blue Bells of Scotland_, too--to hear him play that,
an' the chimes, jest exact! No trouble to make out what 'tis. Oh, he's
a reg'lar musician! He've trained all his sons to same thing. One of
'em plays the fiddle; another of 'em got a thing what he scratches
along wi' wires, sounds purty near like a fiddle.... 'Ten't no good
for 'n in a town, 'less 'tis a fair or summat o' that; but in any
out-o'-the-way place. 'Relse, if he gets to a fair, there'll be three
or four landlords about tryin' to get hold of 'n; and they'll give 'n
five shillin's and supper, and his drink an' a bed, an' what he can
pick up besides. Very often he'll make as much as five-an'-twenty
shillin's in a night(?). And when he comes 'ome, he bring p'r'aps a
gallon o' ha'pence along with 'n. Never no silver, o' course. Often,
when his wife thought he hadn't got nothing but a pound or so, he'd
chuck her five or six pound. Then in the winter he'd go
gravel-diggin', onless there come a fair, or anything o' the likes o'
that. At these pubs where they dances, too, he'd put round the hat
after every dance, an' if there was a good many stood up, p'r'aps he'd
pull in half-a-crown or so."
Cunnin' Jack had a contrivance of musical dancing-dolls, about which I
did not clearly understand. And I have quite forgotten how Bettesworth
spoke of the man's brother, a deaf-mute, who refused to work, and
"lived about at Aldershot, along o' the soldiers."
Afterwards another "dummy" was mentioned: "terrible big strong
feller.... Spiteful.... Goes gravel-cartin' with his father." At a
difficult place in the gravel-pit the father reached out and struck
his son's horse. The "dummy" springs on him, throws him on his back,
making a noise "'bu-bu,' like a calf.... Sure way to upset 'n--if you
was in the gravel pit, touch his hoss...."
Bettesworth had once seen "a dummy, talkin' with a friend of his," in
the finger alphabet. "Can't you understand it?" said the friend to
Bettesworth. "'No,' I says; 'how should I?' But, law! to see him! And
then write, too! Purty near as fast as you can talk. And all the time
his eye 'd be on ye, watchin' ye. But to see him write on his
slate--wonderful fast! and then" (here Bettesworth breaks into
dramatic action, licking his hand and smudging out slate-writing)--"and
then, when he'd rubbed it out, to see him write _again_! Spiteful,
though, _he_ was. So they all be, I s'pose." There was another dumb
man, for instance, who had been apprenticed to a shoemaker....
Unfortunately, I cannot reconstruct this instance. I only remember
that the man had become "a wonderful good shoemaker, but didn't sim to
care about follerin' it," and had "took to gardenin' now," instead.
_May 5, 1898._--On a morning early in May it was raining, quietly,
luxuriously, with a continuous soothing shattering-down of warm drops.
In the doorway of the little tool-shed I stood listening--listening to
the gentle murmur on the roof, on the long fresh grass of a small
orchard plot, and on the young leaves of the plum and the blossoming
apple which made the daylight greener by half veiling the sky.
Beside and beyond these trees were lilacs, purpling for bloom, small
hazels, young elms in a hedgerow--all fair with new greenness; and
farther on, glimpses of cottage roof against the newly dug
garden-ground of the steep hillside. Above the half-diaphanous green
tracery of the trees, cool delicious cloud, "dropping fatness,"
darkened where it sagged nearer to the earth. The light was nowhere
strong, but all tempered moistly, tenderly, to the tenderness of the
young greenery.
I ought to have been busy, yet I stood and listened; for the earth
seemed busy too, but in a softened way, managing its many businesses
beautifully. The air seemed melting into numberless liquid sounds.
Quite near--not three trees off--there was a nightingale nonchalantly
babbling; from the neighbourhood of the cottage came, penetrating, the
bleating of a newly-born goat; while in the orchard just before me
Bettesworth stooped over a zinc pail, which, as he scrubbed it, gave
out a low metallic note. Then there were three undertones or
backgrounds of sound, that of the soft-falling rain being one of them.
Another, which diapered the rain-noise just as the young leaves showed
their diaper-work against the clouds, was the all but unnoticed
singing of larks, high up in the wet. Lastly, to give the final note
of mellowness, of flavoured richness to the morning, I could hear
through the distance which globed and softened it a frequent "Cuckoo,
cuckoo." The sound came and died away, as if the rain had dissolved
it, and came again, and again was lost.
Framed by all this, Bettesworth stooped over his pail, careless of
getting wet. His old earth-brown clothes seemed to belong to the
moistened nook of orchard where he was working; so, too, did his
occasional quiet chatter harmonize well with the pattering of the warm
rain. And for a time the drift of what he said was so much a part of
our quiet country life that I took it as a matter of course, and let
it pass by unnoticed.
But presently he raised his head.
"Have ye heared 'bout young Crosby over here? He's gone clean off his
head. They took 'n off to the asylum at Brookwood this mornin'. Got
this 'ere religion. I s'pose by all accounts he went right into 't;
and that's what 've come of it."