_October 7, 1899._--I have mentioned Bettesworth's neighbour Noah, the
young man who used to sit up too late at night reading the paper.
Notwithstanding this bad habit, he and Bettesworth had been on
excellent terms of friendship. It was to Noah that Bettesworth had
turned, for example, when I lent him those copies of the _Daily
Chronicle_ in which the first particulars of Nansen's voyage in the
_Fram_ were published. Unable to read himself ("I can't see well
enough," he said, "or else I be scholard enough"), he invited Noah and
Noah's wife to come on the Sunday and read to him the explorer's
narrative.
"We started," said he, "about two o'clock, and there they was, turn
and turn about, as hard as ever they could read up to half-past five."
The evening was spent in raising the envy of other neighbours. "They
wanted to borry the papers, but I says, 'No, they ben't mine to
lend.'"
The readers themselves seem to have conceived an intense admiration
for Nansen, whose bed of stones especially excited Bettesworth's
imagination.
"_I_'ve had some hard lay-downs in my time," he exclaimed, "but
_that!_ Gawd! what they poor fellers must ha' suffered!"
Not long afterwards, Noah was called in again to help enjoy a
seedsman's catalogue. It was read through from cover to cover.
Yet Noah proved to be a treacherous friend, after all. I have no
record of the occurrence, but I think it must have been in the summer
of 1897 that he began to covet Bettesworth's pleasant cottage, and by
offering the owner a higher rent succeeded in getting possession of
it. Bettesworth was obliged to quit. He took a cottage in a little row
at three-and-sixpence a week, where he was comfortable enough for
about a couple of years. At the end of that period, however, certain
difficulties over the water-supply became acute--a laundress next door
was pumping the well dry--and other discomforts arising, he began in
the autumn of 1899 to look out for another home.
It is a singular place, this parish. The narrow valley it occupies is
that of a small water-course commonly known as "The Lake," which in
summer is a dry bed of sand, but in winter becomes a respectable brook
of yellow waters which grow quite turbulent at times of flood. In
their turbulence through long ages they have cut deep into the
northern side of the valley, and now for some two miles that northern
side, all warm and sunny, slopes down towards the stream, and there
breaks off in precipitous sand-banks which in most places overhang
the stream and make it inaccessible. But not in all places. There are
various gaps in the sand-banks, where the rains and storms of
centuries have scooped out the upper slope into tiny gorges and warm
secluded hollows, down which footpaths wind steeply, or narrow bumpy
lanes, to some plank bridge or other thrown across the stream. In
these hollows the cottages cluster thickest; there they form little
hamlets whose inhabitants sometimes hardly know the other villagers.
Such, indeed, is my own case: hundreds of my fellow-parishioners half
a mile away are practically strangers to me. Hundreds, for it is a
large parish. The bluffs which separate the hollows are not unpeopled;
they have their cottages and gardens dotted over them without order at
the caprice of former peasant owners. All sorts of footpaths and
tracks connect these habitations, but there are few roads, and those
are deep in sand. For the labouring people do not interchange visits
and pay calls; they just go to work and come home again, each to his
own place. At home, they look out upon their own particular hollow,
and upon little besides; or, living high up on a bluff, they get
outlook upon the other side of the main valley, which is lower, tamer,
smoother than this. It begins--that other side--in narrow meadow or
plough land at the bottom, and so rises gently to a ridge fringed with
cottages. In addition to these dwellings, there are a few hovels down
by the stream itself, with their backs stuck into the sand-cliffs,
and with gardens between cliff and stream so narrow that a man might
almost jump across them. A second jump would take him over the stream
into the meadow-land just mentioned.
With a rapidly increasing population empty cottages are scarce, as
Bettesworth now found. Moreover, his choice was restricted. There were
reasons against his going to the upper end of the valley. It was more
newly peopled by labourers from the town, who had never known, or else
had lost, the older peasant traditions which Bettesworth could still
cherish--in memory, at least--here in the more ancient part of the
village. Of course, that was not how he explained his distaste; he
only expressed a dislike for the society of the upper valley. "They be
a roughish lot up there," he would say. The fact was, he did not know
many of them intimately, from which it may be seen how curiously our
parish society is disintegrated.
Besides, he wanted a cottage not a mile away, but near to his work, so
that he might go home to dinner and see how his wife was getting on.
If he was growing old, she was older; and what was worse, she was
subject to epileptic fits. There were days when he worried about her
all the time while he was at work, and went home uneasily, dreading to
find her fallen down in a fit. It was necessary, therefore, that if he
moved it should be not far away. His last move had been in the wrong
direction--from the adjoining bluff to a hollow further down
stream--and now he desired to get back.
One of the steep and narrow lanes mentioned above is that which runs
down beside this garden, where Bettesworth's work lay. It is
picturesque enough, beneath its deep banks and hedgerows and overhung
by my garden trees; but that is of no moment here. Within
Bettesworth's memory it afforded access even for a waggon right down
to "the Lake," and so over into the meadow opposite; but the last
hundred yards of it, from Mrs. Skinner's cottage downwards, have long
been washed out into a mere foot-track, deeply sunk between its banks,
swooping down precipitously to the stream-level, and scarce two feet
wide. So you emerge from the sand cliffs, and the valley is before
you. Then the footpath winds along to the left (eastwards), having the
cliff on one hand and the stream on the other, to a wider stretch,
until with this for its best approach you come to a little hovel of
three rooms and a lean-to shed, standing with its back walls close in
against the sandy cliff.
At the period we are dealing with, this cottage had a poverty-stricken
appearance, upon which Bettesworth himself had been wont to comment
severely, though the place was in reality no worse than others beyond
it and elsewhere in the parish. But it had suffered from utter neglect
under the previous tenant, a thriftless Irishman, while, after the
Irishman left, it stood empty for a time, and looked like falling
quite derelict. Then, however, the landlord had a few repairs done,
and at the end of September, to my amazement, I heard from Bettesworth
that he had taken it. He would save eighteen-pence a week by the
change: the new rent was only two shillings.
Ought I to have expostulated? Perhaps I should have done so, but for
the queer expression in the old man's face when telling me his
intention. There was some shame, but more of dogged defiance. "You
think what you like," so I interpreted it--"that's the place I'm going
to." He was armed, too, with testimony in favour of the cottage.
"Skinner" (the bricklayer) "says he don't see why it shouldn't make a
very nice little place for two. He done up the roof there t'other
week, and he ought to know." Later, the old man repeated Skinner's
opinion, and added, "I think _I_ can make it comfortable. Ye see,
there en't bin nobody to try before."
This was true enough. The Irishman's tenancy had not in any sense
improved the cottage. The place could not be worse used, and it might
conceivably be fairly habitable in more careful hands.
During the first week in October Bettesworth effected his removal. It
was an inauspicious time. He had been counting upon the stream-bed for
a roadway along which to cart his things, so as to avoid scrambling up
and down the devious pathways and tracks that led to the cottage, but,
unfortunately, the stream this week was in flood. A cart might,
indeed, have struggled along it, and one was, in fact, bespoken--Jack
Crawte's, to wit; but at the appointed time the cart failed to arrive,
and upon Bettesworth's going to inquire for it, he discovered that the
Crawtes were all gone into the town to the fair.
Next day they promised to come "by-and-by." Bettesworth accepted the
promise, but he also chartered two donkey-carts, which were really
more suitable for getting out from the first cottage into one lane,
and then round and about, up and down, to the head of the gully by
Mrs. Skinner's. Farther than that even donkey-carts were useless. For
the last and worst hundred yards nothing but a wheelbarrow or a strong
back could be of any use.
Fortunately (in these circumstances), poor old Bettesworth's household
goods were not many, nor yet magnificent; yet still they were enough
for him to manage. The main of them were shifted on the Thursday, and
I should not like to say how many times that day the old man slaved
down the gorge with loaded wheelbarrow and up with it empty; but Mrs.
Skinner witnessed his doings, and complimented him.
"Why, Freddy," she said--"why, Freddy, you'd kill half the young uns
_now_, old as you be."
There should have been a helper--one Moses Cook, familiarly known as
"Little Moser"; but little Moser was not a success. On the Wednesday,
promising to lend a hand "in five minutes," he delayed coming until he
had found time to get drunk and then arrived with the proposal that
Bettesworth should give him a pint to start with. "_Git_ out o' my
way!" was Bettesworth's reply. The next day the little man was
willing, but useless.
"Couldn't even git up there by ol' Dame Skinner's with a empty barrer!
I says to 'n, 'Git in an' let me wheel ye up!' I says. Made me that
wild! Why, I'd lifted a chest into the barrer all by myself--and _he_
must ha' weighed a hundred and a quarter, with what there was in 'n,
ye know--and wheeled 'n down. And then to see this little feller. 'You
be in my way,' I says. 'You better go 'ome and sit down, and then
p'raps we shall be able to git something done!' I _was_ wild. I told
'n, 'They says Gawd made man in His own image--you must be a bloomin'
counterfeit!'"
At one time there was a threat of rain, and Bettesworth "whacked all
the beddin' he could on to the barrer, and down and in with it."
Fortunately, the rain held off.
Towards night the cart came into action. It brought a load or two of
firewood--not along the stream itself, but beside it, through the
flooded meadow. The wood was tipped out on to the raised bank across
the stream, just opposite Bettesworth's new home, there to remain for
the night. But the old man could not rest with it there.
"I got all that across," he said, "and into the dry. Crawte couldn't
hardly believe it when I told 'n this mornin'. But I _did_. Fetched it
across in the dark." It was an almost incredible feat, for the night
was of the blackest, and the stream four or five feet wide. "And then,
when I got in, I had to put up the bedstead, with only the ol' gal to
help me. An' if you told her one thing, it only seemed to make her
forget to do something else. Talk about _tired_! I never had nothin'
all that time--not even half a pint o' beer. Ye see, there wa'n't
nobody I could send, an' I couldn't spare time to go myself, 'relse I
_should_ ha' liked a glass o' beer. But I never had nothin' not afore
I'd done. Then I had some tea, but I was too tired to eat. P'r'aps, if
I'd ha' been able to have half a pint earlier, I might ha' bin able to
eat; but, as 'twas, I couldn't eat. And now this mornin' my back and
shoulders aches--with wheelin' down that gully, ye know."
As it is not mentioned elsewhere, I may as well say here that
Bettesworth's endeavours to make this little place habitable and
respectable were for a time fairly successful. As it should have been
explained, after emerging from the gully the public footpath runs
close in front of the doorway of the place, leaving some eight feet of
garden between itself and the stream. Of old, in the Irishman's time,
this garden was an entanglement of weeds and stunted cabbages, while
the footpath was unswept, disgusting, and often blocked with a pail of
ashes or other household refuse. But now a spirit of order had
appeared on the scene. The cabbage-plot became comely; in due season
old-fashioned cottage flowers--pinks and nasturtiums--appeared in two
tiny borders under the windows on either side of the door, and the
mean doorway itself was beautified by a rough but sufficient arbour of
larch-posts before it, up which "canary-creeper" found its way.
Accordingly, I heard from time to time, but neglected to set down, how
this and that wayfarer had praised the old man's improvements. Did not
the Vicar himself say (I seem to remember Bettesworth's telling me so
with much gratification) that he would never have believed the place
could be made to look so well? Of the inside, perhaps, not so much
could be said; but even this was passable at first, before the old
wife's breakdown spoilt all. For several years, in fact, Bettesworth
was, I believe, very happy in this cottage. At any rate, it gave him
scope for labour, and he always liked that. He had hardly been in
possession a week before he was talking of an improvement much to his
mind.
"There's a rare lot o' capital soil in the lake under they withies
just against my garden," he said; and he proposed taking it out to
enrich his garden.
"It'll be good for the lake, too," I suggested.
"Yes," he replied, "it wants clearin' out. Why, in some places there
en't no lake, and half the water that comes down got to overflow and
make floods."