I suppose that Bettesworth's Crimean reminiscences occupied in
narration to me something less than fifteen minutes of his life, so
that obviously the space they take up in this volume is out of all
proportion to their importance. For my theme is not this or that
recollection of his, but the way in which the old man lived out these
last of his years, while the memories passed across his mind. It is of
small consequence what he remembered. Had he recalled the Indian
Mutiny instead of the Crimea, it would have been all one, by that wet
afternoon of May, 1902. He would have sat on his block dandling the
chopper just the same, and the raindrops from trees outside would have
come slanting into the shed doorway and splashed on my hand as I
listened to him.
And as they are disproportionately long, these day-dreams of
Bettesworth, so also they become too solid on the printed page, side
by side with the reality which encompassed them then, and is my
subject now. They provoke us to forget the old man, alive and talking.
They take us back fifty years too far. From the hardships of the
Crimean War it is a wrench to return to the reality--the shed in this
valley, the patter of the rain, the old gossipping voice. But all
this, so impossible to restore now that it too has become only a
reminiscence, being then the commonplace of my life as well as of
Bettesworth's, was allowed to pass by almost unnoticed. I let slip
what I really liked, took for granted the strong life that alone made
me care for the conversation, and saved only some dead litter of
observation which was let fall by the living man and seemed to me odd.
Need I explain how of this too I was gradually saving less and less?
The oddness was wearing off; only the more exceptional things seemed
now worth taking care of. Unless there was something as surprising to
hear as this talk of the Crimean War--and such exceptions of course
appeared with increasing rareness--I hardly took the trouble, at this
period, to set down in writing any of Bettesworth's daily gossip. The
naturalist, having noted in his diary the first two swallows that do
not after all make a summer, has no record save in his brain of the
subsequent curvings and interlacings in the summer sky; and I,
similarly, find myself with little besides a vague memory of
Bettesworth's doings in this summer of 1902. In fact, it is not even a
memory that I have. There is only an inference that day by day he must
have done his work in the warm weather, and I must have talked to him.
But I am unable to restore this for a reader's benefit. "Imagine him
going on as usual," shall I say? Why, it is more than I can do myself.
A row of asterisks would serve the purpose equally well.
So there is a void for two months--nay, with one exception, for more
than three, from the middle of May to the end of August; in which one
surmises that the summer flies buzzed in the garden, and Bettesworth
did his hoeing and grass-cutting, and was companionable. The one
exception, fortunately, has the very life in it which I am regretting.
It is but a short sentence of six words, yet they are as if spoken
within the hour, and are the clearer for the void around them.
On the afternoon of July 15, the grape vine on the wall near my window
was being attended to by the pruner. He stood on a ladder, which was
held steady by Bettesworth at the foot; and presently through the open
window the old man's voice reached me, complaining of the recent
blighty weather: "There en't nothin' 'ardly looks _kind_."
"No; not to say _kind_," the pruner assented.
That is all. But precisely because there is nothing in it, because it
is a piece of normal instead of exceptional talk, it has the accent of
the season. Bettesworth's voice reaches me; the light falls warm
through the vine-leaves; the lost summer seems to come back with all
the accompanying scene, almost as distinctly as if I had but just
written the words down.
_August 28, 1902._--The harvest, of course, could not go by without
remark from him. From the garden we could see, beyond the meadow in
the bottom of the valley, a little two-acre cornfield, which had stood
for several days half reaped--the upper side uncut, the lower side
prosperous-looking with its rows of sheaves. Then there came a morning
when it was all in sheaves, and Bettesworth said,
"Old Ben" (meaning Ben Turner) "done it for 'n" (the owner) "last
night. Made a dark job of it."
I realized that in his cottage down by the lake, Bettesworth, going to
bed, had been able to hear the reaping in the dark, across the meadow.
He proceeded, "Ben took his hoss and cart down into Sussex a week or
two ago, to see if he could get a job harvestin'. Was only gone three
days, though: him an' four or five more. But I reckon they only went
off for a booze--I don't believe they made e'er a try to get a
job...."
"Our Will" (his brother-in-law) "says down there at Cowhatch they had
a wonderful crop of oats. But he reckons they've wasted enough with
the machine to ha' paid for reapin' it by hand. Stands to
reason--where them great things comes whoppin' into it over and over,
it shatters out a lot. Will says where they've took up the sheaves you
can see the ground half covered with what they've wasted."
Not knowing what to say, I hesitated, and at last muttered
simultaneously with Bettesworth, "'T seems a pity."
"It's what I calls 'pound wise,'" added he, misquoting a proverb which
possibly was not invented by his class, and was foreign to him.
_September 20, 1902._--I turn over the page in my note-book, but come
to a new date three weeks later. Quiet autumn sunshine, the entry
says, had marked the last few days, breaking through with a limpid
splash in the mornings, after the mist had gone. Amidst this, under
the softened tree-shadows, Bettesworth was cutting grass with his
fag-hook.