I think it must have been during the winter we have reached that the
village policeman stopped me in the road one night to talk about old
Mrs. Bettesworth. He told me, what I vaguely knew, that she was
increasingly ill. Once, if not oftener (I write from memory), he had
helped get her home out of the road, where she had fallen in a fit;
and a fear was upon him that she would come to some tragical end. Then
there would be an inquest; Bettesworth might be blamed for omitting
necessary precautions; at any rate, trouble and scandal must ensue.
The policeman proposed that it would be well if a doctor could see the
old woman occasionally, and suggested that through my influence with
Bettesworth it might be arranged.
Although I promised to see what could be done to carry out so
thoughtful a suggestion, and meant to keep my promise, as a matter of
fact no steps towards its performance were ever taken; and the thing
is mentioned here only as a piece of evidence as to the conditions in
which Bettesworth passed the winter. In the background of his mind,
there stood always the circumstances which had inspired apprehension
in the policeman. I never noted down his dread, because it was too
constant a thing; and for a like reason, he seldom spoke of it; but
there it always was, immovable. The policeman's talk merely shows that
the reasons for it were gathering in force.
Save for one or two other equally vague memories, that winter is lost,
so far as Bettesworth is concerned. We had some cold though not really
severe weather--nothing so terrible as an odd calculation of his would
have made it out to be. "For," said he, "we _be_ gettin' it! The
Vicar's gardener says there was six degrees o' frost this mornin'....
And five yesterday; an' seven the mornin' before. That makes eighteen
degrees!" So he added up the thermometer readings; and, associated
with his words, there comes back to me a winter afternoon in which the
air had grown tense and still. Under an apple-tree, where the ground,
covered with thin snow, was too hard frozen for a tool to penetrate,
the emptyings of an ash-bin from the kitchen lay in a little heap; and
a dozen or so of starlings were quarrelling over this refuse, flying
up to spar at one another, and uttering sharp querulous cries. A white
fog hung in the trees. It was real winter, and I laughed to myself, to
think what a record Bettesworth might make of it by the following
morning.
Seeing that every winter now he was troubled with a cough, I may as
well give here some undated sentences I have preserved, in which he
described how he caught cold on one occasion. "If I'd ha' put on my
wrop as soon 's I left off work," he said, "I should ha' bin aw-right.
'Stead o' that, I went scrawneckin' off 'ome jest's I was, an' that's
how I copt it." The word scrawnecking, whatever he meant by it,
conjures up a picture of him boring blindly ahead with skinny throat
uncovered. He took little care of himself; and considering how ill-fed
he went now that his wife was so helpless, it was small wonder that he
suffered from colds. They did not improve his appetite. They spoilt
many a night's rest for him, too. At such times, the account he used
to give of his coughing was imitative. "Cough cough cough, all night
long." A strong accent on the first and fourth syllables, and a "dying
fall" for the others, gives the cadence.
Beyond these memories nothing else is left of Bettesworth's
experiences during those three months--December, 1903, and January and
February, 1904. Coming to March, I might repeat some interesting
remarks of his upon an affair then agitating the village; but after
all they do not much concern his history, and there are strong reasons
for withholding them. And suppressing these, I find no further account
of him until the middle of May.
The interval, however, between the 3rd of March and the 16th of May,
was sadly eventful for Bettesworth. I cannot say much about it. As
once before when his circumstances grew too tragical, so on this
occasion a vague sense of decency forbade me to sit down and record in
cold blood his sufferings, perhaps for future publication.
What happened was briefly this: that some time in March one of the
colds which had distressed him all the winter settled upon his chest
and rapidly turned to bronchitis. If his wife's condition is taken
into account, the seriousness of the situation will be appreciated. At
his time of life bronchitis would have been bad enough, even with good
nursing; but poor old Lucy Bettesworth was far past devoting to her
husband any attention of that sort. Even in her best state she was
past it, and she was by no means at her best just now. She needed care
herself; had a heavy cold; was at times beyond question slightly
crazy; and, to aggravate the trouble, she was insulting even to the
two or three neighbours who might have conquered their reluctance to
enter the filthy cottage and help the old man. For perhaps a week,
therefore, he lay uncared for, and none realized how ill he was. Only
the next-door neighbour spoke of hearing him coughing all night long.
The old woman received me downstairs when I went to make inquiries.
She sat with her hand at her chest, dishevelled and unspeakably dirty.
And she coughed; tried to attract my sympathy to herself; assured me
"I be as bad as he is"; looked indeed ill, and half-witted. "You can
go up and see 'n," she said. I stumbled up the stairs and found
Bettesworth in bed, with burning cheeks and eyes feverishly bright.
The bedding was disgusting; so were the remains of a bloater left on
the table beside him, so much as to give me a feeling of nausea. As
for nursing, he had had none. He had got out of bed the previous night
and found a packet of mustard, of which he had shaken some into his
hand, and rubbed that into his chest, dry; and that was the only
remedy that had been used for his bronchitis, unless--yes, I think
there was a bottle of medicine on the mantelpiece; for he was still
entitled to the services of the club doctor, who had been sent for.
But in such a case, what could a doctor do?
The next day the old man was worse, at times wandering in his mind.
And, as there was no one else to take the initiative, and as he looked
like dying and involving us all in disgrace, I interviewed the doctor
and--but the story grows wearisome.
To finish, then: the workhouse infirmary was decided upon, as the only
place where Bettesworth could get the nursing without which he would
probably die. Fortunately, he received the proposal reasonably; he was
ready to go anywhere to get well, as he felt that he never would at
home. He merely stipulated that his wife must not be left. A walk to
find the relieving officer and get the necessary orders from him was
to me the only pleasant part of the episode. It took me, on a
brilliant spring evening, some three miles farther into the country,
where I saw the first primroses I had seen outside my garden that
year. It also enabled me to see how parish relief looks from the side
of the poor who have to ask for it, but that was not so pleasant.
However, the officer was civil enough; he gave me the necessary
orders; we made all the arrangements, and on the following day the two
old Bettesworths were driven off miserably in a cab to the workhouse.
How fervently everybody hoped, then, that Bettesworth would leave his
wife behind, if he ever came out of the institution himself alive! And
yet, though it's true he was dependent on me for the wherewithal to
keep his home together, how much nobler was his own behaviour than
that we would have commended! Once in the infirmary, he recovered
quickly; and in ten days, to my amazement (and annoyance at the time),
word came that the old couple were out again. They had toddled feebly
home--a two-mile journey; they two together, not to be separated; each
of them the sole person in the world left to the other. The old woman,
people told me, was amazingly clean. Her hair, which had been cut,
proved white beyond expectation; her face was almost comely now that
it was washed. Had I not seen her? What a pity it was, wasn't it, the
old man wouldn't leave her up there to be took care of, and after all
the trouble it had been, too, to get 'em there!
I believe it was on the day before Good Friday (1904) that they
returned home. When Bettesworth got to work again is more than my
memory tells me. I suppose, though, that I must have paid him a visit
first--probably during the following week; for I remember hoping to
see the old woman's white hair and clean face, and being disappointed
to find her as grimy as ever--her visage almost as black as her hands,
and her hair an ashy grey.