For eight months after this the account of Bettesworth's sayings and
doings is all but a blank. There was one summer--and perhaps it was
this one of the year 1900--when he joined an excursion for his annual
day's holiday, and made a long trip to Weymouth. Need it be said that
he enjoyed the outing immensely? He came back to work the next day
overflowing with the humour and interest of what he had seen and done.
Had not old Bill Brixton lost his hat out of the train? And some other
old chap sat down on a seat on Weymouth front, and stayed there all
day and seen nothing? Bettesworth, too, had sat down, and had a most
enjoyable conversation with a native of the place; but he had also
taken steamer to Portland, and there got a drive to the prison and
seen the convicts, and had a joke and a laugh with the driver of the
brake, and a drink with a party of excursionists from Birmingham, who
appreciated his society, and called him "uncle," and whose unfamiliar
speech he imitated well enough to make me laugh. And then he had
persuaded a seaman to take him out to the fleet and show him over a
man-of-war; and finally had enlivened the homeward journey by chaffing
old Bill, and sharing with him "a quarten o' whisky," which he
carried in a medicine bottle.
This, I am inclined to believe, was an event of 1900, but I cannot
verify it, and in any case it accounts for but one day. The dimness of
the remainder of those eight months is but faintly illuminated--and
that, it may be, for me only--by two memoranda mentioning Bettesworth
as present at certain affairs, and by one all too short scrap of his
own talk. He was speaking of Irishmen, no doubt in reference to some
gallant deed or other in South Africa, and this is what he said:
"Ye see, they makes as brave soldiers as any.... All I got to say
about Irishmen is, when you be at work with 'em, you got to think
yourself as good as they, or a little better. 'Relse if they thinks
you be givin' way they'll trample on ye. 'Xcept for that, I'd as lief
work with Irishmen as Englishmen.... I remember once when I was at
work on a buildin' for Knight, a Irishman come for me with his shovel
like this." Bettesworth turned his shovel edgeways, raising it high.
"He'd ha' split me if he'd ha' hit me; and as soon as he'd missed me I
downed 'n. Little Georgie Knight come down off the scaffold to stop
us; I'd got the feller down, an' was payin' of 'n. '_I'll_ give 'n
'Ome Rule!' I says; and so I did, too. He'd ha' killed me if he'd hit
me. I s'pose I'd said somethin' he didn't like."
A March note, this last. As there is nothing else, I take it that the
daily conversation was of the usual kind, about being forward in
sowing seeds, and allowing enough room for potatoes, and so on.
_June 10._--A note of June names Bettesworth among other interested
spectators of an event no less singular than the death of a donkey. To
me, the name of him on the page of my journal, coupled with one of his
dry remarks, brings back vividly the whole scene: the glowing Sunday
afternoon, the blue loveliness of the distant hills, the look of the
grass, and all the tingling sense of the far-spread summer life
surrounding the dying animal. But the narrative has little to do with
Bettesworth, and would be out of place here. It just serves as a
reminder that one more summer was passing over him; that, among the
strong men who felt the heat in this valley that season, he was still
one.
Carry that impression on, through the harvest time, and yet on and on
until the end of September, and you may see him (or I, at least, may)
one dark night, entering, all dazzled by the naked lamp, a little room
where the Liberals have summoned an "important meeting of Liberal
workers." He has come, like the present writer, in the expectation of
hearing some "spouting," as he said afterwards. But though he is
disappointed, and finds himself,--he, the least fanatic of men--the
witness only of excited efforts to arrange for canvassing the district
in readiness for the approaching election, still, conforming to his
own rule of "behaving," he sits respectfully silent, though looking
disconsolate and "sold," and his grey head, the home of such steady
thoughts, has a pathetic dignity in its dark corner, and surrounded by
the noisy politicians.