Adam on a Working Day
Notwithstanding Mr. Craig’s prophecy, the dark-blue cloud dispersed
itself without having produced the threatened consequences. “The
weather”—as he observed the next morning—“the weather, you see, ’s a
ticklish thing, an’ a fool ’ull hit on’t sometimes when a wise man
misses; that’s why the almanecks get so much credit. It’s one o’ them
chancy things as fools thrive on.”
This unreasonable behaviour of the weather, however, could displease no
one else in Hayslope besides Mr. Craig. All hands were to be out in the
meadows this morning as soon as the dew had risen; the wives and
daughters did double work in every farmhouse, that the maids might give
their help in tossing the hay; and when Adam was marching along the
lanes, with his basket of tools over his shoulder, he caught the sound
of jocose talk and ringing laughter from behind the hedges. The jocose
talk of hay-makers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round
the cows’ necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and
may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it
mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature. Men’s
muscles move better when their souls are making merry music, though
their merriment is of a poor blundering sort, not at all like the
merriment of birds.
And perhaps there is no time in a summer’s day more cheering than when
the warmth of the sun is just beginning to triumph over the freshness
of the morning—when there is just a lingering hint of early coolness to
keep off languor under the delicious influence of warmth. The reason
Adam was walking along the lanes at this time was because his work for
the rest of the day lay at a country-house about three miles off, which
was being put in repair for the son of a neighbouring squire; and he
had been busy since early morning with the packing of panels, doors,
and chimney-pieces, in a waggon which was now gone on before him, while
Jonathan Burge himself had ridden to the spot on horseback, to await
its arrival and direct the workmen.
This little walk was a rest to Adam, and he was unconsciously under the
charm of the moment. It was summer morning in his heart, and he saw
Hetty in the sunshine—a sunshine without glare, with slanting rays that
tremble between the delicate shadows of the leaves. He thought,
yesterday when he put out his hand to her as they came out of church,
that there was a touch of melancholy kindness in her face, such as he
had not seen before, and he took it as a sign that she had some
sympathy with his family trouble. Poor fellow! That touch of melancholy
came from quite another source, but how was he to know? We look at the
one little woman’s face we love as we look at the face of our mother
earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings. It was
impossible for Adam not to feel that what had happened in the last week
had brought the prospect of marriage nearer to him. Hitherto he had
felt keenly the danger that some other man might step in and get
possession of Hetty’s heart and hand, while he himself was still in a
position that made him shrink from asking her to accept him. Even if he
had had a strong hope that she was fond of him—and his hope was far
from being strong—he had been too heavily burdened with other claims to
provide a home for himself and Hetty—a home such as he could expect her
to be content with after the comfort and plenty of the Farm. Like all
strong natures, Adam had confidence in his ability to achieve something
in the future; he felt sure he should some day, if he lived, be able to
maintain a family and make a good broad path for himself; but he had
too cool a head not to estimate to the full the obstacles that were to
be overcome. And the time would be so long! And there was Hetty, like a
bright-cheeked apple hanging over the orchard wall, within sight of
everybody, and everybody must long for her! To be sure, if she loved
him very much, she would be content to wait for him: but _did_ she love
him? His hopes had never risen so high that he had dared to ask her. He
was clear-sighted enough to be aware that her uncle and aunt would have
looked kindly on his suit, and indeed, without this encouragement he
would never have persevered in going to the Farm; but it was impossible
to come to any but fluctuating conclusions about Hetty’s feelings. She
was like a kitten, and had the same distractingly pretty looks, that
meant nothing, for everybody that came near her.
But now he could not help saying to himself that the heaviest part of
his burden was removed, and that even before the end of another year
his circumstances might be brought into a shape that would allow him to
think of marrying. It would always be a hard struggle with his mother,
he knew: she would be jealous of any wife he might choose, and she had
set her mind especially against Hetty—perhaps for no other reason than
that she suspected Hetty to be the woman he _had_ chosen. It would
never do, he feared, for his mother to live in the same house with him
when he was married; and yet how hard she would think it if he asked
her to leave him! Yes, there was a great deal of pain to be gone
through with his mother, but it was a case in which he must make her
feel that his will was strong—it would be better for her in the end.
For himself, he would have liked that they should all live together
till Seth was married, and they might have built a bit themselves to
the old house, and made more room. He did not like “to part wi’ th’
lad”: they had hardly ever been separated for more than a day since
they were born.
But Adam had no sooner caught his imagination leaping forward in this
way—making arrangements for an uncertain future—than he checked
himself. “A pretty building I’m making, without either bricks or
timber. I’m up i’ the garret a’ready, and haven’t so much as dug the
foundation.” Whenever Adam was strongly convinced of any proposition,
it took the form of a principle in his mind: it was knowledge to be
acted on, as much as the knowledge that damp will cause rust. Perhaps
here lay the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of: he had
too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of
foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get
enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions
in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a
strong determined soul can learn it—by getting his heart-strings bound
round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward
consequence of their error, but their inward suffering. That is a long
and hard lesson, and Adam had at present only learned the alphabet of
it in his father’s sudden death, which, by annihilating in an instant
all that had stimulated his indignation, had sent a sudden rush of
thought and memory over what had claimed his pity and tenderness.
But it was Adam’s strength, not its correlative hardness, that
influenced his meditations this morning. He had long made up his mind
that it would be wrong as well as foolish for him to marry a blooming
young girl, so long as he had no other prospect than that of growing
poverty with a growing family. And his savings had been so constantly
drawn upon (besides the terrible sweep of paying for Seth’s substitute
in the militia) that he had not enough money beforehand to furnish even
a small cottage, and keep something in reserve against a rainy day. He
had good hope that he should be “firmer on his legs” by and by; but he
could not be satisfied with a vague confidence in his arm and brain; he
must have definite plans, and set about them at once. The partnership
with Jonathan Burge was not to be thought of at present—there were
things implicitly tacked to it that he could not accept; but Adam
thought that he and Seth might carry on a little business for
themselves in addition to their journeyman’s work, by buying a small
stock of superior wood and making articles of household furniture, for
which Adam had no end of contrivances. Seth might gain more by working
at separate jobs under Adam’s direction than by his journeyman’s work,
and Adam, in his overhours, could do all the “nice” work that required
peculiar skill. The money gained in this way, with the good wages he
received as foreman, would soon enable them to get beforehand with the
world, so sparingly as they would all live now. No sooner had this
little plan shaped itself in his mind than he began to be busy with
exact calculations about the wood to be bought and the particular
article of furniture that should be undertaken first—a kitchen cupboard
of his own contrivance, with such an ingenious arrangement of
sliding-doors and bolts, such convenient nooks for stowing household
provender, and such a symmetrical result to the eye, that every good
housewife would be in raptures with it, and fall through all the
gradations of melancholy longing till her husband promised to buy it
for her. Adam pictured to himself Mrs. Poyser examining it with her
keen eye and trying in vain to find out a deficiency; and, of course,
close to Mrs. Poyser stood Hetty, and Adam was again beguiled from
calculations and contrivances into dreams and hopes. Yes, he would go
and see her this evening—it was so long since he had been at the Hall
Farm. He would have liked to go to the night-school, to see why Bartle
Massey had not been at church yesterday, for he feared his old friend
was ill; but, unless he could manage both visits, this last must be put
off till to-morrow—the desire to be near Hetty and to speak to her
again was too strong.
As he made up his mind to this, he was coming very near to the end of
his walk, within the sound of the hammers at work on the refitting of
the old house. The sound of tools to a clever workman who loves his
work is like the tentative sounds of the orchestra to the violinist who
has to bear his part in the overture: the strong fibres begin their
accustomed thrill, and what was a moment before joy, vexation, or
ambition, begins its change into energy. All passion becomes strength
when it has an outlet from the narrow limits of our personal lot in the
labour of our right arm, the cunning of our right hand, or the still,
creative activity of our thought. Look at Adam through the rest of the
day, as he stands on the scaffolding with the two-feet ruler in his
hand, whistling low while he considers how a difficulty about a
floor-joist or a window-frame is to be overcome; or as he pushes one of
the younger workmen aside and takes his place in upheaving a weight of
timber, saying, “Let alone, lad! Thee’st got too much gristle i’ thy
bones yet”; or as he fixes his keen black eyes on the motions of a
workman on the other side of the room and warns him that his distances
are not right. Look at this broad-shouldered man with the bare muscular
arms, and the thick, firm, black hair tossed about like trodden
meadow-grass whenever he takes off his paper cap, and with the strong
barytone voice bursting every now and then into loud and solemn
psalm-tunes, as if seeking an outlet for superfluous strength, yet
presently checking himself, apparently crossed by some thought which
jars with the singing. Perhaps, if you had not been already in the
secret, you might not have guessed what sad memories, what warm
affection, what tender fluttering hopes, had their home in this
athletic body with the broken finger-nails—in this rough man, who knew
no better lyrics than he could find in the Old and New Version and an
occasional hymn; who knew the smallest possible amount of profane
history; and for whom the motion and shape of the earth, the course of
the sun, and the changes of the seasons lay in the region of mystery
just made visible by fragmentary knowledge. It had cost Adam a great
deal of trouble and work in overhours to know what he knew over and
above the secrets of his handicraft, and that acquaintance with
mechanics and figures, and the nature of the materials he worked with,
which was made easy to him by inborn inherited faculty—to get the
mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other
mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable
character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller,
and, moreover, to learn his musical notes and part-singing. Besides all
this, he had read his Bible, including the apocryphal books; Poor
Richard’s Almanac, Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, The Pilgrim’s
Progress, with Bunyan’s Life and Holy War, a great deal of Bailey’s
Dictionary, Valentine and Orson, and part of a History of Babylon,
which Bartle Massey had lent him. He might have had many more books
from Bartle Massey, but he had no time for reading “the commin print,”
as Lisbeth called it, so busy as he was with figures in all the leisure
moments which he did not fill up with extra carpentry.
Adam, you perceive, was by no means a marvellous man, nor, properly
speaking, a genius, yet I will not pretend that his was an ordinary
character among workmen; and it would not be at all a safe conclusion
that the next best man you may happen to see with a basket of tools
over his shoulder and a paper cap on his head has the strong conscience
and the strong sense, the blended susceptibility and self-command, of
our friend Adam. He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are
reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans—with
an inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common
need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in
skilful courageous labour: they make their way upwards, rarely as
geniuses, most commonly as painstaking honest men, with the skill and
conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have
no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt, but you
are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building,
some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming
practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are
associated by one or two generations after them. Their employers were
the richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and the
work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men. They went
about in their youth in flannel or paper caps, in coats black with
coal-dust or streaked with lime and red paint; in old age their white
hairs are seen in a place of honour at church and at market, and they
tell their well-dressed sons and daughters, seated round the bright
hearth on winter evenings, how pleased they were when they first earned
their twopence a-day. Others there are who die poor and never put off
the workman’s coat on weekdays. They have not had the art of getting
rich, but they are men of trust, and when they die before the work is
all out of them, it is as if some main screw had got loose in a
machine; the master who employed them says, “Where shall I find their
like?”