Mr Jeremy's system for the regulation of human life was summed up in the
maxim, "Put your back into it"; and a lifetime of practising what he
preached has endowed that part, or aspect, of his person with an
astonishing vitality and developed it to an enormous size. Not without
reason did our yeomanry sergeant exhibit his stock joke by informing
Jeremy on parade that if only his head had been set the other way he
would have had the finest chest in the British army.
But the full significance of Jeremy's back was not to be perceived by
one who looked upon it from the drill-sergeant's point of view. It was
not only the broadest but the most expressive organ of the farmer's
body, and a poet's eye was needed to interpret the meaning it conveyed.
For myself, I should never have suspected that it meant anything more
than great physical strength employed in a strenuous life, had not a
poetical friend of mine taken the matter up and enlightened me. My
friend and I were crossing a field by the footpath, and Jeremy, walking
rapidly in the same direction, was a few yards ahead.
"There goes a man," I whispered, "who is worth your study. You could
write a poem about him. He's one of the few remaining specimens of a
type that is becoming extinct. He represents agriculture as it was
before the advent of science and Radical legislation. He is the most
honest and prosperous farmer in the county: a man, moreover, who has
endured many sorrows and conquered them. Let us overtake him, for I
should like you to see him face to face."
"Not so," said my friend. "The man's history, as you have told it, and
much more beside, is written on his back. Let us remain, therefore, as
we are, and study him where such men can best be studied, from the
rear. His back, I perceive, especially the upper portion of it, is the
principal organ of his intelligence. Observe, he is thinking with his
back even now--he hitched his trousers up a moment ago. His thoughts are
pleasant--you can see it in the rhythmical movement of the muscles under
his coat. He has some great design on hand and is sure he can carry it
through--see how his shoulders, as he swings along, seem to be tumbling
forward over his chest. He has had great sorrows--the droop in the
cervical vertebrae confirms it; he has conquered them--hence that forward
plunge into his task. He understands his business; of course; for the
back is the organ by which all business is understood. He is honest; he
is temperate; he has never broken the seventh commandment. You can read
his innocence in the back of his head--I wish mine were like his." And
my poetical friend turned round and showed me his villainous cerebellum.
Thus enlightened, I began a closer study of the farmer's habits. I saw
a new significance in an odd trick he had of suddenly swinging round on
his heels at the interesting point of a conversation and delivering his
remarks, and sometimes shaking his fist, with his back to the
interlocutor. I say his back, but functionally considered it was not so;
since at those moments the functions of the two sides of his body were
interchanged, the organ of expression being the side now towards you,
with every smile and frown accurately registered in the creases of the
coat as they followed the movements of the muscles beneath. So, too,
when Jeremy laughed. No doubt his face, while laughing, was expressive
enough, but you couldn't see it, because it was turned the other way.
What you did see was the farmer's coat, _a tergo_, twitching up and down
as though pulled by a cord and then suddenly released like a Venetian
blind; and this was quite enough to ensure your hearty participation in
the merriment.
I also managed to take several interesting photographs from the rear;
and (may the saints forgive him!) a young gentleman of my acquaintance
once attempted to snapshot the hinder parts of Jeremy while in church.
Unfortunately the light was bad, and the negative proved a failure.
Otherwise my poetical friend, for whom I intended the photograph, would
certainly have found in it material for a new poem. Be it recorded that
Jeremy when engaged in devotion did not kneel, but stretched his body
forward from the seat to the book-rest, presenting his back to the
heavens and his face to the inner regions of the earth; and, as his body
was very long and the pew very wide, the back formed a solid and
substantial bridge over which you might have trundled a wheelbarrow
laden with turnips. No photograph, indeed, save one of the cinematograph
order, the apparatus for which was too large to lie concealed beneath
the young gentleman's waistcoat, would have reproduced the creepings,
ripplings, and dimplings of the farmer's coat. These gave animation to
the picture; but even without them, the mere contour of the mass, thrust
upwards like the back of a diving whale, was a spectacle of vigour and
concentrated purpose of which my poetical friend would not have lost the
significance.
Jeremy was the oldest of the Duke's tenantry, and the land he farmed,
which was of high quality throughout, had been held by his father, his
grandfather, his great-grandfather, and by ancestors of yet remoter
date. If there is any calling in which heredity is of importance to
success it is surely the farmer's, and Jeremy was fully conscious that
he "had it in the blood," and recognised the debt he owed to his fathers
before him.
People are wont to criticise the old-fashioned farmer as a stiff and
unadaptable person; but what struck me about Jeremy, who was
old-fashioned enough, was the adaptiveness and flexibility of his mind
in dealing with the ever-varying conditions the farmer has to face. He
had an extraordinary instinct for doing the right thing at the right
time, and handled his land as though it were a living thing, with a kind
of unconscious tact which seemed to me the exact opposite to that blind
and mechanical following of habit which so often, but so mistakenly, is
said to be the standing fault of his class. Obstinate and incredulous as
he seemed to the new teachings of veterinary or agricultural science, I
yet noticed that Jeremy managed to absorb enough of these things to
produce the results he desired; and though he never absorbed as much of
them as the experts required, his crops were always larger and his stock
healthier than those of his neighbours whose farming was strictly
according to the modern card.
I have read one or two books on the nature of soils, and it is not
without significance to me that the little, the very little, useful
knowledge I have of these things was derived not from the books but from
Mr Jeremy. There was a bit of ground in my garden where I could make
nothing grow, and I hunted in vain through all the gardening books I
could find for a remedy, and even went the length of consulting some of
the gifted authors, two of whom were ladies. I sent them specimens of
the soil for examination; they teased them with formulae and tormented
them with acids; they boiled them in retorts and pickled them in glass
tubes; they sent me the names of marauding bacteria whose lodgings they
had discovered in that morsel of earth: and I, following their
instructions, dosed the land with atrocious chemicals, until the
earth-worms sickened and the very snails forsook the tainted spot. Still
nothing would grow.
Then came Mr Jeremy. He picked up a handful of the soil; gazed at it as
a lapidary gazes at diamonds; smelt it; felt it tenderly with his
forefinger; spat upon it; rubbed the mixture on his breeches; inspected
the result, first on his breeches and then on his hand--and now my
barren patch is blossoming like the garden of the Lord. The others had
advised me to try I know not what--nitrates of this and phosphates of
that, sulphates of the other and carbonates of something else. Mr Jeremy
said, "Chuck a cart-load o' fine sand on her and then rip her up."
Mr Jeremy, I have said, was aware that his roots struck deeply into the
past, and this consciousness, I believe, helped to give him that
confidence in himself without which no man can successfully till the
earth or battle with destiny--the two things, I believe, being at bottom
much the same.
His farmhouse, so far as I could judge, was built--and built of almost
imperishable stone--in the later years of the reign of Charles II., and
had never been structurally modified since its erection. Some of the
out-buildings were of yet earlier date. Scattered about in odd corners
were not a few interesting relics of the past. For example, there was a
case of coins, which had been arranged for Jeremy by the late Rector's
wife, representing every reign from Charles I. to George IV., every one
of which coins had been dug up on the farm. In the big courtyard there
was a block of hard stone scored with grooves and notches, where the
troopers in some forgotten battle were said to have sharpened their
swords; on the outside wall was a row of rings and stables where the
same troopers had tethered their horses. In the cellar there was a
collection of large shot, which there was reason to think had been
stored there at the time of the forgotten battle; and with these were a
lot of iron buckles, and broken tobacco-pipes of ancient form, which had
been dug up in a mound on the hillside through which Jeremy was cutting
a drain. A good pint-measure of human teeth, in excellent preservation,
had been discovered in the same place, and these were kept in an old
tobacco-box. Connected with all this, I suppose, were the names of
several of the fields on the farm: one of which was called "The
Slaughters"; another, "Horses' Water"; another, "The Guns." And besides
these, which reminded one of "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles
long ago," there were two other fields, the names of which were also
interesting to me. One, a beautiful meadow with a southern slope, was
"Abbot's Vineyard," and the big pond with the aspens beside it was
"Benedict's Pool." Of these names the explanation was utterly lost; nor
could I invent a theory, for the nearest religious house of
pre-Reformation times was many miles away. The other field was called
"Quebec," and the coppice at its upper end was "Monckton Wood."
These latter names I am able to explain. Several of Jeremy's ancestors
had been to the wars, among them his great-great-grandfather Silas
Jeremy, who had fought under Wolfe at the capture of Quebec, and
probably under Monckton in some earlier campaign. In the house there
were several mementoes of this man: the identical George II. shilling he
had received on enlisting--proving, as Jeremy would often say, that his
great-great-grandfather was a "sober" man; a gold watch with a
beautifully executed design of the death of Wolfe engraved on the case,
said to have been presented to Silas on his return from the wars by the
reigning Duke; and, above all, a flint-lock musket, with bayonet
attached, which Jeremy asserted his ancestor had used in the battle, but
which I judged on examination to have been of French manufacture, and
therefore most probably a relic picked up from the battle-field--perhaps
the identical musket along whose barrel some French grenadier had taken
aim at the noble heart of Wolfe--who knows?
Another memorial of this ancestor--a pretty obvious one--I can myself
claim to have identified. It was an obstinate rule of the farm that the
annual "harvest-home" should be held on September 13; and even if the
harvest was much belated and only a portion then gathered in, still
September 13 was the date, provided only that it did not fall on a
Sunday. September 13, I need hardly say, is the anniversary of the
battle of the Heights of Abraham. The coincidence had been entirely
forgotten by the Jeremys, and was unrecorded in the traditions of our
village; but not many days after I had pointed it out, the gossips
having been at work in the meantime, an old man came in from a
neighbouring parish and told me "as how" his father had talked with a
man who knew another man who had been present at the Jeremys'
harvest-home in 1760, when Silas Jeremy, who had just come back from
foreign parts, and whose tomb was in the churchyard, sang a song about
the taking of Quebec, which the old man's father used to sing--though he
himself couldn't remember it--and declared that for all time to come the
feast should be held on Quebec Day, and on no other.
This little circumstance, I may say in passing, was the beginning of my
friendship with the Jeremy who forms the subject of the present story.
My discovery of the coincidence gave him a most exaggerated opinion of
my abilities and worth. To quote his own words, it proved me to be "a
gentleman as knows what's what"--a characteristic which, so far as I am
aware, has never been revealed to anybody else. And Jeremy's good
opinion of me was yet further enhanced when he learnt that I had twice
visited the Plains of Abraham; that I knew the place by heart; that I
had climbed up the goat-path by which his ancestor had scaled the
heights, and had laid my head on the spot where Wolfe met his most
enviable death. He would have me into his house that very night to tell
him all about it; showed me the George II. shilling and the gold watch;
took down the old musket and let me handle it and put it to my shoulder
and even pull the trigger; spent two hours in rapt attention while I
read out Parkman's account of the battle; and finally summed up the
whole campaign and its significance in one sweeping comment, "By Gum,
sir, them fellers put their backs into it, and that's _just_ what they
did!"
The same held true, I should think, of Jeremy's grandfather, to judge by
another relic carefully treasured in the house. This was an enormous
iron crowbar, the mere lifting of which was a challenge to "put your
back into it." With this weapon the Jeremy of that day had successfully
defended himself against a crowd of rascals who came out to burn his
ricks in '32. Some memories of that fight were still extant in the
village, and a bonny fight it must have been. My informant, an
eyewitness of the scene, was too nearly imbecile to stand
cross-examination; but what he remembered was to the point. Aware of
the impending danger, Jeremy had built his ricks that year within the
defences of his courtyard, the walls of which he had rendered unscalable
by various devices. It only remained, therefore, to defend the gate; and
here were posted Timothy Caine with a maul, Job Henderson with a flail,
an unnamed woman with a cauldron of flour to fling in the face of the
enemy, and the farmer with the crowbar. These won the day; and more I
cannot tell you, because my informant's language, which I could never
induce him to vary, became extremely metaphorical at this point: "Master
Jeremy, he give 'em pen and ink: pen and ink is what he give 'em with
the crowbar, sir, that he did; there was none on 'em wanted hitting
twice, no, not one; and, my eye! to see the flour a-flying! What a steam
it made! I can see it now."
Agricultural experts who visited our parish, though forced to admire the
excellence of Jeremy's farming, were wont to criticise him for being
"too slow." Now there, I think, they were distinctly wrong. I have
nothing to say against Agricultural Science: I wish there was more of
it; but if it has a weakness it lies in a certain tendency to be "quick"
precisely at those points where Jeremy was triumphantly "slow." His
slowness was simply the instinctive timing of his action to the
movements of Nature, who is also "slow" in relation to yet higher
powers. You would often think that he was dawdling; but if you looked
into the matter you were sure to find that just then Nature was dawdling
too, and that Jeremy was beating her at a waiting game. So, too, if you
watched a python creeping from branch to branch or lying coiled in a
glass case you would judge it to be the slowest of beasts; but not if
you saw it springing on its prey. There was much of the wisdom of the
serpent in Mr Jeremy, as there must be in every man who earns his living
by battle with the natural order of the world. "I wakes regularly at
five o'clock," he said. "But I never gets up till a quarter past. What
do I think about in that quarter of an hour? Why, I spends it in
_cutting out_." By "cutting out" he meant the process of mentally
arranging the day's work for himself and for every man on the farm. The
python on the branch, I imagine, is often engaged in "cutting out." "In
farming," he added, for he was giving a lesson, "you ought to cut out
fresh every day, and not every week, as some farmers do--though I've
knowed them as never cut out at all. And cutting out's a thing you can
never learn in books and colleges. It comes by experience--and a light
hand. Sometimes you must cut out _rough_, and sometimes you must cut out
_fine_--mostly according to the weather and the time o' year--and always
_leave a bit somewhere as isn't cut out at all_. And when you've done
the cutting out, take a look out o' the window and tap your glass. Do it
the minute you jumps out o' bed. And if there's been a change in the
wind during the night, cut out _again_ while you're pulling your
breeches on and tear up what you've cut out already. And don't give no
orders to anybody till you've had your breakfast--leastways a cup o'
tea; it clears a man's head and lets you see if you've been making any
mistakes. I've often cut out six or seven times between waking and
giving the day's orders--what with the tricks of the weather and my head
not being as clear as it ought to have been." And I wondered how often
Napoleon had done the same thing.
Indeed, if I may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of
slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. Such
slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in
farming, in war, and in many other things. And of Mr Jeremy we may say
that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition
of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in
the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. This gave
him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being
"slow." At the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of
farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in
Agricultural Colleges.
I have to confess that my acquaintance with Mr Jeremy has not been
without a certain demoralising effect. It has corrupted the brightness
of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my
youth. I will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether
vanished; but, thanks to Mr Jeremy's influence, I have learned to see
them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for
purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land
and its uses I have entirely lost the very little effectiveness I once
had. There was a time when if anyone mentioned the land I always wanted
to make a speech. Now I feel--what no doubt I ought to have felt
then--that I must hold my tongue. To be quite frank, my views on the
land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. That
a farmer owning his own land was _caeteris paribus_ necessarily better
off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth
discussion. But if I had to speak on that point now, I should hesitate
and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience
to regard me as a fool. Instead of speaking out loud and strong for
peasant proprietorship, I should be thinking all the time of the three
peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood--George Corey, Charles
Narroway, and Billy Hoare, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most
underhand and generally despicable rascals I have ever met. Were a
resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the
townspeople back on to the land, I should say in support that while it
is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it
is yet worse to see people like Prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out
of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. I should want to tell
the audience all about Prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he
has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village
shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he
sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told
me to go to the devil when I begged him not to build his abominable
house where it would spoil the view: and then I should want to add a few
details about his personal habits which I am afraid would cause the
ladies to walk out of the room. And I should wind up by saying, amid the
derisive laughter of the audience, that one reason, at all events, why
the real peasants go _into_ the towns is to escape from slavery to these
pinchbeck fellows who come _out_ of the towns. I should want to
quote--but I am afraid my courage would have already broken down--what
Jeremy once said to me:--"The Dook--when did you ever hear of any man
going into the town as worked on _his_ estate? But as for this 'ere
Prendergast, I wonder the very pigs stop in his stye."
Undoubtedly it was due to Jeremy's influence that I came to appreciate
this side of the matter. He also taught me to regard the tenant farmer
as superior to all other varieties of his class. I know it is
wrong-headed, generalising from a particular case and all that--but I
would rather be wrong-headed with Jeremy, who took a back-view of
everything, than right-headed with some forward spirits who treat the
land as a _corpus vile_ for political experiments. And what logical mind
could resist arguments like the following, back-views though they be?
"It takes _two_, sir," said Jeremy, "for to handle the land. A nobleman
to own it, and a farmer to cultivate it. There's nothing that gives you
_confidence_ like having a real gentleman behind you--and the Dook's a
real gentleman if ever there was one. And you want confidence in
farming--and that's what these 'ere Radicals don't see. I don't want
none o' _their_ safeguards! Give me the Dook--he's safeguard enough for
me! And what safeguard have you when fellers like Prendergast begin
buying up the land? Look at _his_ tenants--not a real farmer among 'em,
no, and not one as can make both ends meet. These little landlords are
the men they ought to shoot at, not the big 'uns. Now isn't it a
wonderful thing that my family and the Dook's has kept step with one
another for a matter of two hundred years? Eight Dooks in that time and
eight Jeremys--one Jeremy to each Dook! But who'll ever keep step with
Prendergast? Who'll ever _want_ to? Why, I wouldn't be seen walking down
the street with him, no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds.
And if he was to offer me his best farm rent-free to-morrow, I'd tell
him to go and boil hisself.
"No, sir," he continued, "it don't pay to own the land you farm; and
don't you believe them as tells you it does. Leastways, it pays a sight
better to farm under a good landlord. Them as can't make farming pay
under a landlord, can't make it pay at all. Now look at me and then look
at Charley Shott. Me and Charley started the same year, him with 400
acres of his own, and me with 380 acres under the Dook, rented all round
at twenty-eight shillings an acre. And where are we both now after
thirty years? Why, if Charley's land, and all he's made on it, and all
he's put into it, were set at auction to-morrow, I could buy him up
twice over! And me paying over five hundred pounds a year rent for
thirty years, and him not paying a penny. How does that come about?
Well, you're not a farmer, and you wouldn't understand if I told you.
But I'll tell you one thing as perhaps you can understand. It hurts the
land to break it up. And it _hurts_ the land still more to _sell_ it.
Now I dare say you never heard of that before."