Custom, which is the Law, and says that what you did the day before
yesterday is sanction for doing it the day after to-morrow; that, and
exact mutual knowledge of your own and your neighbours’ affairs. There
is a third: common poverty. Everybody is poor--or if he is not, he must
seem so. That is invariable, for where everyone is poor, and everyone’s
affairs known to everyone else, a very jealous eye is kept for any
variation from the standard. Poverty--and by poverty I mean the state
where you never have quite enough for the week’s expenses, are never
more than a week’s pay off “the Parish,” and have to trust to windfalls
for mere necessaries--that kind of poverty is a state which can only
be borne in company. In the village it is the general state, and while
that is so the villagers will put up, it seems, with almost anything.
Custom, which assures them that it was like that for their forefathers,
enables them to accept their continual privations. I daresay there is
nobody in the village, of cottage rank, who has ever known an ordinary
day when he was not hungry after a meal. They say that that is good
for you. My only comment is, Try it, and it won’t seem to be so. They
will stand that; and being cold in bed; and letting the fire out when
you are not cooking something--so that you come home wet and tired to
cold ashes, and must chop kindling before you can be warm or dry; and
working incessantly, as the women do, for almost nothing or literally
nothing; and wearing the same clothes until they fall off you; and
washing at the sink downstairs because you are too tired to take water
upstairs; and having windows that won’t open, and doors that won’t
shut--but why go on? Worse things than any of these are endured in the
slums of great towns. The village makes little of them, provided that
they are shared; but the moment it knows, or has cause to suspect that
any one of its number has had “a stroke of luck,” come into money, had
a useful present made him, or found a well-paid job, then it is at
once dissatisfied with its lot, and the lucky offender hears about it.
It is not that village people are naturally unkind to each other--far
from that, they are kindness itself in times of trouble. But they are
incurably suspicious, and quicker to believe ill than well of each
other. They grudge prosperity to a neighbour less than resent it. It
seems a slight upon themselves. A hot and bitter question surges up,
Why should that good fortune happen to her; and what have I done to be
left out? By some queer jugglery of the mind, the first half of the
question answers the second half; the happy one is so at the expense
of the less favoured. If you engage a girl in the village for some
daily task, her friends, as likely as not, will cut her in the street.
I knew a woman in Norfolk whose husband was killed by a fall from a
straw-stack. Compensation, insurance, club-money, presents from the
benevolent flowed in to the widow, whose neighbours saw her not only
free as air, but comfortably off according to village standards. They
called her “the Lady,” and some of her own family would have nothing to
do with her.
Indiscriminate or heedless present-giving should therefore be
avoided, unless you wish harm to come to the object of your alms.
There was a man in a village over the hill who was doing a turn of
work in the house of a newcomer, a rich young man with the most
friendly intentions. Talking to his labourer one day and noticing his
unconventional leg-covering, it suddenly shot across his mind that he
had lately tried on a new pair of trousers and taken them off again
in a rage because of their cut. “By George,” he thought, “I like this
chap. Now I’ll give him those beastly trousers”--which he did. On
Sunday, then, there shone upon the church-going village young Richard
in the newest pair of trousers it had ever seen, except, of course,
upon the legs of a “gentleman,” where they would have been simply
unremarkable, _hors concours_. But now it was as if a private in a
file should show up there in a cocked hat with feathers. The trousers
were glossy from the iron, they caught the sun. The creases before or
behind would have cut a swathe. In the after-dinner time, when some
favoured corner hums with youth, it hummed to only one tune; and on
Monday the children going to school called out after young Richard,
“Who stole my trousers?” It will now be understood why no village can
be found without its miser. Between hiding and hoarding there is only a
difference of degree. The first is forced upon the villager, for public
opinion is too many for him; he dare not let it be known that he has
anything to put by. The mattress used to be the favourite place for
your economies. If it is not used now it is simply to save the waste
of good ticking which always followed a death. Now it will be a hole
under the hearthstone, or in the thatch, or a _cache_ under the third
gooseberry bush as you go down the garden. Sometimes it is so well
hidden that, if death be sudden, it is never found at all. Sometimes
the hider will forget where he hid his money, and dig up the whole
garden in the middle of the night. Mr. Pepys was in that predicament
and, so feverishly did he hunt, lost quite a number of broad pieces.
But the worst case is where he knows the hiding-place exactly, and
going to recover his treasure, finds that somebody else had known it
too; and so it has gone. Cruel dilemma! He dare not let his loss be
known, nor, should he be able, accuse the thief. His only remedy in
such circumstance is to steal from the stealer. I heard of an old woman
who was robbed of twenty pounds, which she kept in an old beehive, and
who knew perfectly well where the money was. She said nothing at all,
continued her acquaintance, and even used to have the thief to tea with
her. I don’t know how it was done--whether it dawned upon the guilty
that she was suspected, and so compunction came. Anyhow, as I was
told, the money was restored.
It may seem odd that when a villager rises in the world, as they often
do, he ceases to be grudged. I am not sure that he really does; but no
signs of grudging appear, simply because he ceases to be a villager.
Rank is carefully observed--but it is all outside. There is no rank in
the village itself. All are level there--except in one way. And that
exception is not odd, either.
Walking down the street at certain hours of the day you will meet
certain old men, elders of the people. Although they differ in no
respect from any others you may find there, you will notice this about
them that they will be “Mr.” to everyone, and not, as is usual, Jack,
Tom, or Jimmy. What has procured them their title of honour? Not always
age, certainly never riches: as often as not the bearer of a title
will be an old-age pensioner. Or he may be “on the rates.” It doesn’t
matter. Some native worth or resident dignity forbids the use of his
Christian name, which is otherwise of invariable application. That
points to a real aristocracy, an aristocracy of character; the only
one which can hope to be permanent, as founded upon reason and nature;
and the one without which no democracy can expect to be permanent
either. Walking with one of these patricians the other day, I observed
before us a man of near his age. Presently there came towards us an
urchin homing from school, who passing our front rank, a man old enough
to be his great grandfather, lightly acclaimed him with “Afternoon,
George.” But to my companion it was, “Afternoon, Mr. M----.” With the
women--married, of course--the decencies are observed in salutation,
but not in reference. You will hear of one as old Liz Marchant, of
another, always, as Mrs. Catchpole, or whatever her name may be. But,
to each other, married women are strict formalists. Two girls who have
known each other from childhood and been at school together will be
Florry and Bess to the very church-porch. From the wedding day onwards,
if they should live to be a hundred, they will be “Mrs.” to each other.
That would fill me with wonder if I did not know how seriously the
married state is taken in the village, the more so, I don’t doubt,
because the single is more free than is convenient. Marriage, we say,
sets right every irregularity. Perhaps it does; but in these parts it
effectively prevents there being any more.
I have been expounding, it should be seen, what are virtually the
manners and customs of a nation widely different from that of most of
my readers. It is not really an economic, but an historic difference;
for the longer I study it the clearer it becomes that the village does
not differ in any essential respect from its remotest original, the
Neolithic settlements on the tops of these hills. From where I live, a
quarter way up the chalk down, I could conduct the inquirer to three
or four vestiges of communities exactly like this one. I could point
out the holes in which they lived, the track by which they drove their
flocks to and from the watering places, which are still _in situ_ and
still used. I could lay a wreath on the mound which covers their dust,
or I might by a chance of the spade uncover their bones, not dust yet.
There has never been discovered, so far as I am aware, anything to show
that any one man of that nation lorded it over his fellows. Lords and
masters enough there have been since. From the time when the Alpine
race invaded our country the Iberian stock which underlies us all has
never lacked a master. _But they have none now._ They have employers,
hirers, not masters. So far as I can see the West Country village
community is now once more just where it was fifteen hundred years
before Christ, or thirty-five hundred years ago. It is in the valley
instead of on the hill, it is professedly Christian instead of heathen.
But it is still guided by tradition, and governed by common opinion,
and as near a democracy as may be: a democracy tempered by character.
THE CURTAINS
Your pair of muslin curtains, given time and place, may cost you
anything in the region of four, eleven, three, as the shop will tell
you; but if you add to that domestic calm, the amenities and a raw
sconce they soon mount up. That was what they cost a man I know, and
I say that they are not worth it. For, not to dwell for a moment upon
his particular pair, muslin curtains don’t fulfil the whole duty of
curtains, but only a part of it, and the wrong part. They prevent you
from seeing out of the window, which is the last thing you want of
them in the country; they don’t prevent other people from seeing into
it--which is the first thing. Particularly when you have the lamp
alight. For instance, the other evening the whole village was informed
inside of an hour that Mrs. Hobday, a young and pretty woman, had been
trying on a hat with one hand and powdering her nose with the other.
She herself was the last to know it, and the last to be allowed to
forget it.
The Hobdays’ neighbours are the Cosseys, and Mrs. Hobday and Mrs.
Cossey from the first were bosom friends. That was very important if
life were to be what you might call life, for the two front doors are
under one lintel, and, said Mrs. Cossey, “’tis such close living that
if you weren’t one thing you must be t’other.” But they were always
the one thing until the affair of the curtains, though Mrs. Cossey was
large and plain-faced, and Mrs. Hobday pretty and small; though Mrs.
Cossey had two children and Mrs. Hobday was only expecting. However,
from the very first we were told ’twas all as pleasant as pleasant.
They lived in each other’s houses, listened to each other’s tales
of courtship and marriage, admired each other’s washing, and shook
sympathetic heads over the unreasonableness of each other’s husband.
There were no clouds in the sky, nor the makings of them. The Cosseys
had an Axminster, but the Hobdays a new drugget. Mrs. Cossey had a
copper kettle, Mrs. Hobday a silver teapot. Things were “just so,” neck
and neck, and nothing to choose between them, when you came to add
things up. O sweet content! And then, one mild morning, Mrs. Cossey was
offered a seat in a motor-car going into town, and accepted.
It was a fine day; she was elated by her drive. Market-day, too. She
felt like going it, and she went it. Away flew five shillings on a pair
of muslin curtains which were selling like hot cakes at a stall. Mrs.
Cossey bought other things, but nothing to count. The curtains fair set
her up, they did. She felt as though she were treading on air. Wherever
she went about the town that day she had an eye for the windows, and
saw nothing better anywhere. “I’ll make Fred put ’em up after dark,”
she promised herself. “’Twill be a surprise for Mrs. Hobday in the
morning.” It was.
When Mrs. Hobday saw her friend’s front-room window she felt her heart
jump, then stand still. But she knew what was due to herself, and let
not a sigh escape her. Mrs. Cossey found her busy on her knees over
the doorstep, busier certainly than she had ever been before. It became
necessary to call her attention to the curtains, which somehow took the
edge off them. You can’t explain it, but so ’twas. Then, of course,
Mrs. Hobday admired; and when she had admired enough, she was told all
about it; and when she knew all about it she said no more, but excused
herself for being busy, and withdrew. Nor, if you will believe Mrs.
Cossey, was she seen again for two days and nights; never so much as
put her head outside the door. But Mrs. Cossey did not know how she
had wept on Hobday’s shoulder that evening of discovery, how she had
pleaded (as they used to do at Assizes, poor things) her condition, and
how Hobday had said she shouldn’t want for anything, if it cost him ten
shillin’--which it did. She knew nothing of all that; but in two days’
time, when she stood at her front door, and, happening to look at her
neighbour’s window, might, so she said, have been knocked down with a
feather--then indeed she knew all the blackness of Mrs. Hobday’s heart.
Whatever she might have been knocked down with, she herself used a
club, that is to say, most injurious words. The whole village heard
them, at second-hand, from Tom Crewkomb, the sweep, who had been
passing at the time. Warmed by eloquence, it seems, and her growing
sense of triumphant suffering, Mrs. Cossey called Mrs. Hobday a saucy
young piece; whereat Mrs. Hobday, as if whipped, struck out blindly
and said that Mrs. Cossey was no better than she should be. It may
have been true--it is true of most of us; but Mrs. Cossey took it to
heart and, refusing all nourishment, could do nothing but repeat it
to herself over and over again. The pair of cottages, resplendently
curtained as they might be, became a house of lamentation. The
breaking-point was reached when Hobday came home to tea, and being
again wept upon, pushed fiercely into next door and called Mrs. Cossey
to her face an old tantamount--a terrible word, whose implication
no man could possibly know. For end thereof, not despondency but
madness: for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a
tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a
pair of clippers over the ear. Hobday was a light-weight, and did his
best, but he could not get near Cossey; and he went to grass. Mrs.
Hobday had hysterics, and asked for the doctor; and then (such is human
nature at its best) Mrs. Cossey ran in to her, called her a lamb, and
put her to bed.
It is a boy.
Mrs. Cossey and Mrs. Hobday have better things to admire in each other
now. But Mrs. Hobday knows that her curtains cost more. So also does
Hobday.
HAPPINESS IN THE VILLAGE
Not far from me there lives a man with wife and child in a tenement
not much better than a cowshed. It is exactly two rooms of a wooden
building, with no other conveniences of any kind, not so much as
a copper for the washing. It is built into a ledge cut out of the
southern slope of the valley, consequently never looks the sun in the
face. I know that the rain falls through into the bedroom. If one dared
one would have the place condemned, if to do that would not condemn
to the workhouse those who shelter there. Yet I have known those poor
things envied. At a certain hour of the afternoon the wife comes to her
open door, the child in her arms. After five minutes’ watching, she
sets the little creature down to totter up the road, down which comes
a man, homing from his work. He too is on the look-out, and stands to
admire. Then, when they meet, he picks up the baby, sets it on his
shoulder, and back they go together to mother at the door. I have known
that envied, I say, by the childless, by the unhappily mated, and by
those whose days for children are over and done. Life has that in
store for some of us, and I don’t know that it has anything better. An
allegory, that, in its way.
Four years ago, when Agriculture had a Wages Board, and hopes were
high that a _carminis aetas_ was opening for our oldest industry, a
club was formed among the members of the Board for the ventilation of
ideas. It was a gallant adventure, maintained with spirit so long as
the parent Board was suffered to endure. Political exigencies, however,
determined its existence, and with it perished the Agricultural Club.
Now its president and virtual founder, Sir Henry Rew, has published
its remains in “The Story of the Agricultural Club” (P. S. King and
Son), and we are able to judge of the remedies proposed for a sick
profession. It may shortly be said of the club, as of the deceased
board, that its very existence did more service to agriculture than
any of its recommendations, if only because it was solid in Pall Mall
while its remedies were, and largely remain, in the air. In that fine
room of Schomberg House, which happens to have been Gainsborough’s
studio, there met on the eve of every Board-meeting representatives of
the landed interests from all England, squires, tenant-farmers and farm
labourers, on terms of that complete equality which only clubmanship
can guarantee. How extraordinary that was is illustrated by Sir Henry
Rew as follows:
“A year ago I had occasion to attend a meeting in the market
town of a typical agricultural district. It purported to be
a conference between the representatives of farmers and of
farm-workers with regard to a dispute then in progress. I was
shown into the conference room, where I found the farmers
assembled in force round a large table, and I was honoured with a
seat at the head of the table by the side of the chairman. After
some discussion among themselves, the chairman announced that they
were ready to receive the representations of the workers. About
half a dozen of them entered, and were ranged on a form against
the wall at the lower end of the room. The Chairman addressed them
civilly enough, but with much the same air of condescension as
a magistrate assumes in speaking from the Bench. I am sure that
no offence was intended or taken. The position seemed perfectly
natural to both parties. It was the normal and habitual relation
of master and man in discussion.”
It is fair to conclude, with Sir Henry, that the Wages Board and its
club were “the expression of a new relationship,” not that of “master
and man,” but rather of “man and man”; and it is not difficult to
say what that may imply in latter-day village life. I am prepared by
observation to say that at least it implies a definite heightening
of status for the farm-labourer, of which he is very well aware. But
whether it will work out for village prosperity and (a very different
thing) village happiness, is still a matter of various opinion--opinion
which is reflected in the papers read before the assembled club, and in
the ensuing discussions.
These papers, as one might expect, are mainly practical in purpose.
They deal with education, principally technical; they deal with
cottage-building, not very fruitfully; they offer proposals for
the formation of village-clubs; they touch, but gingerly, upon the
ownership of land. The avowed ends of every proposition are two: how to
keep the labourer in the village, and how to make him happy when he is
there. It seems to me that readers and debaters alike fell into the
common error of confusing prosperity with happiness, and happiness with
pleasure. The mistake is fundamental. If all men of pleasure were happy
men, legislation might accomplish what philosophers have failed to do.
If excitement had no reactions, then let village clubs abound and young
ploughmen dance all night! Bread and circuses are within the discretion
of Parliament, but not prosperity, and not happiness. A man must work
for his happiness “as some men toil after virtue”; and the education
which he must receive in order to attain it is in another technic than
that which has been in the mind of the Club. The young villager must
acquire mental alacrity, he must learn to be temperate, and he must get
charity. Having those, he may pick up happiness like gold off from Tom
Tiddler’s ground, for the world is full of it. All the specifics of the
Agricultural Club are palliatives of his lot, “consolatories writ.” The
elementals remain--to be sought elsewhere.
The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to
deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to
his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow,
and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than
half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who
gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What
is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise
early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did
yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had
it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of
them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming,
is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom
of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the
prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store
of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the
village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in
the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens,
nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste
their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy
than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers
of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others
abide our question, but not those.
OTHERWHERENESS
The man whom I found one day in the reading-room at the Club, searching
the Court Guide to find out his own name, was quite good-tempered
about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to send a telegram, and he
had written it out: when it came to signing it he was beat. I told him
at once what I believed his name to be; he verified it in Boyle. “I
might have had to get a dressing-room,” he said. “It isn’t one of those
things which you can ask the hall-porter.”
The really absent-minded are not irritated by those intrusions
of the supra-liminal self. The sub-liminal so pleasantly employs
them, habitually, that they can afford to put up with the other’s
impertinence. But occasionally he goes too far, as he certainly did
with a dear and vague friend of mine when, horribly involved with a
fishing line and a fly-hook in his sleeve, he hastily put his eye-glass
into his mouth and his cigarette into his eye. Then indeed he broke
into a flood of imprecation, so very unlike himself that one part of
him “which never was heard to speak so free” really shocked the other
part. “Oh, shameful, shameful!” I heard him say, and the profaner part
was silenced. Here, of course, the whole assembled man was no further
away than the whereabouts of the fly-hook, and not at all pleasantly
occupied. Mostly, as Lamb says of his good friend, George Dyer:
“With G. D., to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to
speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very
time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no
recognition--or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised--at
that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor--or Parnassus--or
co-sphered with Plato--or, with Harrington, framing ‘immortal
commonwealths.’”
If he interrupted those happy sojournings, as he did once, to make
a call in Bedford Square, and on learning that no one was at home,
solemnly to sign his name in the visitors’ book, it is not at all
surprising that, wandering on and on, he should presently find himself
again in Bedford Square, again inquire for his friends, again ask for
the visitors’ book and be brought up short, on the point of signing it
again, by his own name scarcely dry--as if, says Lamb, “a man should
suddenly encounter his own duplicate.” He may have been a little
mortified, I daresay, but--it was worth it. A thing of the same sort
happened to a very delightful lady of my friends--a lady of commanding
presence, but occasional remarkable absences too. She went to call at
a house in Eaton Square, no less, and found herself, when the door was
opened by a footman, totally deprived of the name of the houselady.
What did she? There was a moment of heart-beating and wild surmise;
and then, with a smile of ineffable courtesy and sweetness, she held
out her hand to the wondering man, pressed his own warmly as she said
“_Good_-bye,” and sailed serenely away to resume her commerce with
the infinite. Such commerce, I know, she had. She told me the story
herself, and saw nothing amiss with it. Nor was there anything amiss.
She was one who could do simple things simply--which is a great and
rich possession; but occasionally she presumed upon it--as when she
assured herself of the same virtue in her daughters and expected them
to carry out her simplifications. That, of course, was a very different
thing; but I don’t think she understood it. There is this also to be
said, that women are much less self-conscious than men and do not go in
such terror of being made ridiculous. Tell me of a man who could enter
his drawing-room full of guests, and discovering himself without, say,
his teeth, could laugh in the first face his eye encountered. “Forgive
me--one moment--I must get my teeth”--tell me of such a man. _Mutatis
mutandis_, I have been told of such a woman--and a great lady she was,
too--by somebody who was there. It was not teeth, however.