The Old Year, so far as my notes show it, had run to its close without
event for Bettesworth, just as the New Year was to do, excepting for
one big trouble. Yet he was not quite the man at the opening of 1903
that he had been at the opening of 1902. The twelve uneventful months
had, in fact, been leaving their marks upon him--marks almost
imperceptible as each occurred, yet progressive, cumulative in their
effect. On this day or on that, none could have pointed to a change in
the old man, or alleged that he was not so the day before; but as the
seasons swung round it was impossible not to perceive how he was
aging. It is well, therefore, to pause and see what he had become by
this time before we enter upon another year of his life.
There was one silent witness to the increasing decay of his powers
that could not be overlooked. The garden gave him away. People coming
to visit me and it were embarrassed to know what to say, or they even
hinted that it would be an economy to allow Bettesworth a small
pension and hire a younger man, who would do as much work, and do it
better, in half the time. As if I needed to be told that! But then
they were not witnesses, with me, of the pluck--better worth
preserving than any garden--with which Bettesworth sought to make
amends for his vanished youth. His tenacity deepened my regard for
him, even while its poor results almost wore out my patience. He who
had once moved with such vigour was getting slow; and the time was
coming, if it had not come, when I had to wait and dawdle while he
dragged along behind me from one part of the garden to another. A more
serious matter was that with greater effort on his part the garden
ground was less well worked. I don't believe he knew that. He used a
favourite old spade, worn down like himself, and never realized that
"two spits deep" with this tool were little better than one spit with
a proper one; and he could not make out why the carrots forked, and
the peas failed early.
But the worst trial of all was due to another and more pitiful cause.
I could reconcile myself to indifferent crops--after all, I had
enough--but exasperation was daily renewed by the little daily
failures in routine work, owing to his defective sight, which grew
worse and worse. There were the garden paths. With what care the old
man drew his broom along them, working by faith and not sight, blindly
feeling for the rubbish he could not see, and getting it all save from
some corner or other of which his theories had forgotten to take
account! Little nests of disorder collected in this way, to-day here,
to-morrow somewhere else, surprising, offensive to the eye. Again, at
the lawn-mowing, never man worked harder than Bettesworth, or more
conscientiously; but he could not see the track of his machine, and
seams of uncut grass often disfigured the smoothness of the turf even
after he had gone twice over it to make sure of perfection. It was
alarming to see him go near a flower border. He would avoid treading
on any plant of whose existence he knew, by an act of memory; but he
could not know all, and I had to limit his labours strictly to that
part of the garden he planted or tended himself.
What made the situation so difficult to deal with was that his
intentions were so good. He was himself hardly aware that he failed,
and I rather sought to keep him in ignorance of the fact than
otherwise. I felt instinctively that, once it was admitted, all would
be over for Bettesworth; because he was incapable of mending, and open
complaints from me must in the end have led to his dismissal. For that
I was not prepared. He would never get another employment; to cut him
off from this would be like saying that the world had no more use for
him and he might as well die out of the way. But I had no courage to
condemn him to death because my lawn was ill cut. With one exception,
when I sent him to an oculist to see if spectacles would help him (the
oculist reported to me that there was "practically no sight left"), we
kept up the fiction that he could see to do his work. And his
patient, silent struggles to do well were not without an element of
greatness.
But though the drawbacks to employing the old man were many, and such
as to set me oftentimes wondering how long I should be able to endure
them, it must not be thought that he was altogether useless. If he was
slow, he was still strong; if he was half blind, he was wholly
efficient at heavy straightforward work. During this winter, in making
some radical changes which involved a good deal of excavating work,
Bettesworth was like a first-rate navvy, and eagerly put all his
experience at my disposal. There was a trench to be opened for laying
a water-pipe. With a young man to help him, he dug it out and filled
it in again, in about half the time that the job would have taken if
it had been entrusted to a contractor. In one place a little pocket of
bright red gravel was found. This, of his own initiative, he put aside
for use on the paths which he was too blind to sweep clean. But, in
truth, a sort of sympathy with my desires and a keen eye to my
interests frequently inspired him to do the right thing in this kind
of way. He had identified himself with the place; was proud of it;
boasted to his friends of "our" successes; and like a miser over his
hoard, never spared himself where the good of the garden was
concerned, but with aching limbs--his ankle where he had once broken
it pained him cruelly at times--went slaving on for his own
satisfaction, when I would have suggested to him to take things
easily.
I have said that there were those who considered him too expensive a
protégé for me. There were others, I am sure, to whom he appeared no
better than a tedious old man, opinionated, gossiping, not over clean.
Pretty often--especially in bad weather, when there was not much he
could be doing--he went on errands for me to the town, to fetch home
groceries and take vegetables to my friends, and all that sort of
thing. At my friends' he liked calling; they owed to him rather than
to me not a few cookings of cabbage and sticks of celery, for which
they would reward him with praise, and perhaps a glass of beer or the
price of it. Afterwards I would hear lamentings from them how long he
had stayed talking. Once or twice--hardly oftener in all these
years--I had to speak to him in sharp reprimand for being such a
prodigious long time gone; for the glass of beer and the gossip where
he delivered his cabbages did not always satisfy his cravings for
society and comfort: he would turn into a public-house--"Dan
Vickery's" for choice--and come back too late and too talkative. It
was a fault, if you like; but the wonder to me is, not that he
sometimes drank two glasses where one was enough, but that, with his
wit and delight in good company, he did not oftener fall from grace.
Those two or three occasions when he earned my sharp reproofs, and for
half a day afterwards lost his sense of comfort in me as a friend,
were probably times when his home had grown too dreary, his outlook
too hopeless, even for his fortitude. Some readers, no doubt, will be
offended by his taste for beer. I hope there will be some to give him
credit for the months and years in which, with these few exceptions,
he controlled the appetite. Remember, he had no religious convictions,
nor did the peasant traditions by which he lived afford him much
guidance. Alone, of his own inborn instinct for being a decent man, he
strove through all his life, not to be rich, but to live upright and
unashamed. Fumbling, tiresome, garrulous, unprofitable, lean and grim
and dirty in outward appearance, the grey old life was full of fight
for its idea of being a man; full of fight and patience and stubborn
resolve not to give in to anything which it had learnt to regard as
weakness. I remember looking down, after I had upbraided a failure, at
the old limbs bending over the soil in such humility, and I could
hardly bear the thought that very likely they were tired and aching.
This enfeebled body--dead now and mouldering in the churchyard--was
alive in those days, and felt pain. Do but think of that, and then
think of the patient, resolute spirit in it, which almost never
indulged its weaknesses, but had its self-respect, its half-savage
instincts toward righteousness, its smothered tastes, its untold
affections and its tenderness. That was the old man, gaunt-limbed, but
good-tempered, partially blind and fumbling, but experienced, whom we
have to imagine now indomitably facing yet another year of his life,
and a prospect in which there is little for him to hope for. Nay,
there was much for him to dread, had he known. A separate chapter,
however, must be given to the severe trouble which, as already hinted,
overtook him in the early weeks of 1903.