_March 7, 1905._--Bettesworth left the infirmary on Saturday morning,
March the 4th. I met him half a mile away from it, in the town, and he
was trembling with weakness where he stood. But he protested that he
should get home well enough; he had just had a nice rest, a friend of
mine having taken him into his house to sit down by the fire. My
friend told me afterwards how the old man, invited in because of his
pitiable condition, had seemed to crawl in a state of collapse to the
chair set for him.
His tale to my friend was curiously different from the account he gave
me of his leaving the infirmary. To the former he explained that on
the Thursday he had desired to be allowed to go home. The wish was
communicated on the next day to the doctor, who asked, "Do you want to
go then?" and was answered ungraciously, "I shan't get no better
here." On Saturday, therefore, his clothes were brought to him, and
out he came.
But this was not quite the same story that he told me. Perhaps I
should premise that I felt annoyed with him for coming out, since it
was plain who would have to provide for him; and he may have seen
that I was displeased when I said, "You have no business out! You're
not fit for work, and you ought to have stayed another week or two."
Somehow so I greeted him, none too kindly. He replied that there were
seven or eight "turned out" that morning, their room being wanted for
others. Nor did he forget to complain. His clothes, he said, having
been tied in a bundle with a ticket on them, and tossed into a shed,
had been returned to him so damp that he felt "shivery" getting into
them; and there was no fire by which to dress.
What did he propose to do? was my next question. He was going home, to
make up a fire in his bedroom and air his bed. Already he had arranged
with Liz and Jack to come and help him do that. Such of his things as
were worth anyone's buying he should sell--Mrs. Eggar, for instance,
would take the Windsor chairs; and then he was going to live,
probably, at Jack's. But his first care was to go and air his bed.
Firing--coal, at least--he possessed; wood could be provided by
knocking up two old tables which were grown rickety. To my protest
against such destruction, he replied that already before his illness
he had touched one of the tables with his little axe.
He trembled, but his mouth shut resolutely, so that I got the
impression, and that not for the first time of late, of something
desperate about him, something hard, fierce, suspicious.
The discrepancy between his stories to my friend and to myself
strengthens the impression, and as I write this a hypothesis shapes
itself: that he fears to lose his employment with me; fears that I am
weary of him and anxious to get him permanently settled in the
workhouse. For this reason, perhaps, he reviles that hated place,
hurries from it, will not own to weakness though I see him shaking,
will be independent as to coal and the rest. I asked him how he was
off for money. He could do with a shilling or so; but he did not want
to get into debt.
That was three days ago. I was from home to-day when he came to see
me, announcing himself vastly better. He has gone to live with Jack,
in whose house he has a room to himself and "a nice soft bed," and is
well looked after, he says. Liz has even been giving him a cup of tea
in bed--or desiring to do so.
I understand him to have said that the old cot used to cost him as
much as six shillings a week to keep going. And that, he added, would
be nearly enough for him to live upon, in his new quarters.
_March 8._--I have promised Bettesworth (we walked down the garden
this morning to talk it over out of earshot) that when he finds
himself past work I will make him an allowance, to keep him from the
workhouse. He is to tell me, when the time comes; at present, he still
hopes to do a little more.
I was wrong, it seems, in surmising that dread of losing his
employment made him so anxious to quit the infirmary. "Was it so?" was
a question put to him this morning, point blank. He denied it. "No,"
he said; "I was afraid I should die. That's what made me so eager to
get away. I felt I should die if I bid there another week." So many
died, he said, while he was there--several in one day, I understood,
one being the man in the bed next to Bettesworth's. This man "made up
his mind" and was gone, in twenty minutes--one Freeland, from
Moorways. There also died there a certain old Taff Skinner, an old
neighbour whom Bettesworth, in his own convalescence, tried to get
upstairs to see. A nurse turned him back, he protesting that he
"didn't know as he was doin' wrong," and she explaining that he might
only visit another room or ward on visiting day. "Or else," he told
me, "Old Taff's wife an' daughter was there, and ast me if I wouldn't
go an' see 'n to cheer 'n up."
Having got home and shifted a few things to Jack's, Bettesworth's
great joy was in his "nice soft bed." He has been used to feathers,
and found the mattress hard at the infirmary. He said with gusto,
"That was a treat to me, to get into that bed and roll myself over.
And my poor old back seemed almost well the next morning." Across the
loins and down the back of his thighs he is tender, and his elbows
were beginning to get sore from hoisting himself up on the mattress.
To ease the loins Jack has been rubbing in "some o' that strong
liniment." On the whole Jack seems to be treating the old man very
well.
That he will continue to do so is devoutly to be hoped. For there are
not many refuges open to Bettesworth now, nor can the infirmary any
more be looked to as one of them. According to his last version of it,
when the doctor asked him if it was really his wish to leave, he
answered, "Once I gets away I'll never come here no more, not if
there's a ditch at home I can die in."
_March 12._--I find there is a steady set of public opinion--that is
to say, the opinion of his own class--against Bettesworth, which has
grown very marked since he came out of the infirmary, although
probably it is not quite a new thing.
One of the first indications of it, besides old Nanny's animosity
already mentioned, appeared while he was still away, when Bill Crawte
spoke to me in the town, alleging that the old man had been
misbehaving of late in his evenings. I received an impression of
drinking bouts and disorder, which was conveyed in innuendo rather
than directly. "He spends too much money at the public-house; and he
can't take much without its going to his head"--such was Crawte's
expression, intended, it seemed, to warn me that I was deceived in my
protégé.
A few days ago I met old Mrs. Skinner. I remember that I crossed the
street to speak to her "because she was such a stranger," and she
looked flattered, but complained of "such a bad face-ache, sir," and
grimaced, holding her black shawl over her mouth. Then she hurried
into the subject of Bettesworth's home-coming, and did not hesitate to
assure me that he was "a _bad_ old man." Once again I felt that I was
being warned that the old man was unworthy of my help. I had heard
Mrs. Skinner before, however--months before--on the same subject. In
her way she is a good woman whom I like and respect, but she has a
taste for commenting on other people's faults. Moreover, there was
never much love lost between her and Bettesworth: his old tongue, I
suspect, has been too shrewd for her at times.
Yesterday I met old Nanny, with a bundle on her back, and I stopped to
speak, partly sheltered from a driving rain by the umbrella she held
behind her. She, too, has not scrupled before to complain of
Bettesworth's behaviour, and always with the air of saying to me "he's
not the good old man you take him for." But yesterday her tongue knew
no reticence; she felt wronged herself, and she lashed Bettesworth's
character mercilessly, in the hope of hurting him in my esteem. Swift
and snappish, out came the long screed, while the old woman's eyes
were fiery and her cheeks flushed. Oh, but she felt righteous, I am
sure. She was exposing a blackguard, a scamp! And if she could injure
him, she would.
I do not recall many of her words. His ingratitude to her was
Bettesworth's chief offence--after all she had done for him! So she
told what she had done: how she had cooked his supper night after
night, and got it all ready while he sat down there at the
public-house waiting to be fetched. She wouldn't have done it, but Kid
said, "Poor old feller, help 'n all you can. He en't got nobody to do
anything for him." And she had washed his clothes, and scrubbed out
his house; and he was such a dirty old man that it almost made her
sick. And when he was ill, Mrs. Cook watching (downstairs, I gathered)
was obliged to sit all night with the window open, because the place
so stank. I heard how many pails of water it took to scrub the floor;
how the boards upstairs--new boards "as white as drippen snow" when
the Bettesworths took possession--would in all likelihood never come
white again; and how the landlord had said that he should demand a
week's rent (from me, of course) to pay for cleaning, when Bettesworth
moved. And now Bettesworth was gone away, "taking his money" (his
wages or his allowance), and "I don't like it, Mr. Bourne!" said old
Nanny, vehemently. Not, apparently, that the money was an object to
her, but that all her good offices had gone unthanked, nay, minimized.
Had not Bettesworth complained that he had no one to do anything for
him? And all the time Mrs. Norris was slaving for him. Had he not told
me during his illness that he had taken nothing, when, in fact, Mrs.
Cook not long before had taken him up a cup of tea and two slices of
bread and butter, which he had eaten? "I don't _like_ it, Mr. Bourne."
No, I could see that she did not; I could hear as much in the emphasis
of the words, rapped out like swift hammer-strokes; and the old woman
looked almost handsome in the flush of her indignation.
I left her and passed on, wondering what the original offence could
have been to produce such bitterness. Probably it was some harsh
speech of Bettesworth's, some antique savagery drawn from him in the
despair of his lonely situation, with his powers failing, the
workhouse looming. Suspicious, hard, obstinate, wrapped-up now wholly
in himself, he may easily ... but it is useless to surmise.
Useless is it, too, to pretend that the repeated insinuations have had
no effect upon me. As a rule backbiters succeed only in making me see
their own unreason, while mentally I take sides with their victims;
but in this case fancies of my own were corroborated by the slanders
of the neighbours. I have believed, and think it likely, that
Bettesworth is ready to deceive me to his own advantage, just as I
have long known that he has not really been worth half his wages. He
is in desperate plight, dependent on my caprice, and he cannot afford
to be over scrupulous on a point of honour. As for old Nanny and the
others, I suppose their sense of justice is outraged by Bettesworth's
good fortune in having my protection. They are jealous; they resent
the imposition which they suppose is being put upon me, and imagine me
a blind fool who ought to be enlightened.
To-day I fell in with old Mrs. Hall, whose husband is still at the
infirmary. She had nothing hopeful to tell me about that old man's
condition. He had been more contented, however, since his master had
written to him, though he did talk, bedridden as he is, of digging a
hole somewhere under the infirmary wall, so that he might escape to
the cab that would bring him back home. But Mrs. Hall didn't think--if
she said what she really thought--that he would ever come home again.
At his great age (why, he is eighty to-morrow!) how could she hope
that he would recover? Poor little dumpy old woman, with the plump
face, and dainty chin, and round eyes--her lips trembled, talking of
her husband and of her own difficulties. "For while he lays up there,"
she said, "I got nothin' to live on," except a little help from the
Vicar. Her daughter, married and away in Devonshire, will pay the
quarter's rent, but....
"And Mr. Bettesworth's out, it seems," the old woman continued. "It
seems to me he's an ungrateful old man. For 'tis all nice and
comfortable up there. It do seem ungrateful."
Such was Mrs. Hall's unasked for, unexpected comment, on Bettesworth's
behaviour. Poor old woman, to me too it seemed unjust that she should
be so unaided, and he, perhaps, so over-aided. He is no old woman,
though; allowance must be made for that. He could not away with the
sort of comfort so praised by Mrs. Hall.
Is, then, the last word about Bettesworth to be that he is dirty,
dishonest, degraded? He may be all three (he certainly is the first)
and yet have a claim to be helped now and remembered with honour.
For, as another recent incident has served to remind me, our point of
view is in danger of growing too narrow. One of the kindest of
cultured women, going about her work of visiting the sick, asked me
how Bettesworth was doing. Then, in her amiable way, she talked of him
and of his wife, and soon was speaking of the extreme dirtiness in
which they had lived. As a district visitor she had once or twice come
upon them at meal-times, when their food on the table caused her a
physical loathing--just as once I had been nauseated myself by the
sight of a kippered herring by the old man's bedside. The district
visitor--being invited and finding no courteous excuse for
refusal--had sat down in Bettesworth's easy-chair, not without dread
of what she might bring away. Most cottages she could visit without
such terrors; most people, she supposed, "managed to get a tub once a
week"; but the Bettesworths.... The lady spoke laughingly. In her
comely life, an experience like this is afterwards an adventure.