Part 13

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."

I confessed that I had not.

"Well, it's a fact. When you break land up it won't _keep_. It goes like rotten apples: first a bit goes rotten here and then a bit there; and the rottenness spreads and runs together. And as to _selling_, I tell you there's something in the land _as knows when you're goin' to sell it, and loses heart_. I've seen the same thing in 'osses. It takes the land longer to get used to a new master than it does a 'oss; and there's some land as never will.

"No, sir, I say again, if you want to make farming _pay_, take a farm on a big estate, one that's never been broke up and's never likely to be, one that's been in the same hands for hundreds o' years, one that's never been shaken up and messed with and slopped all over with lawyer's ink, and made sour with lawyer's lies. Never mind if the rent's a bit stiffish. Rent never bothered _me_."

I ventured to dissent from these opinions, for I had given lectures on Political Economy, and I knew of at least four different theories of Rent all at variance with Jeremy's--and with one another. Perhaps I should have succeeded better had I known of only one. But, knowing of four, I may have become a little confused in my attempts to confute Farmer Jeremy. Not that this made very much difference. On all questions relating to the nature of land and its uses Jeremy was a mystic, and orthodox Political Economy was as futile to his mind as it was to Mr Ruskin's. Every position I took up was immediately stormed by the rejoinder, "Ah, well, you're not a farmer, and you don't understand." I could not help remembering that I had often been overthrown in more abstruse arguments by the same sort of answer. I might, indeed, have countered by saying, "Ah, well, Mr Jeremy, you're not an economist, and _you_ don't understand." But it occurred to me that the reply would be feeble.

"I tell you," he went on, "that good land _likes_ to be high-rented. It sort o' keeps it in humour. Land _likes_ to be owned by a gentleman, and keeps its heart up accordin'. Whenever the rent o' land goes down, the quality goes down too. I've noticed it again and again."

I tried to indicate that this last statement was an inversion of cause and effect, but the argument made not the faintest impression on Mr Jeremy, who merely brushed away a fly that had settled on his nose, and continued:

"I never spoke to the Dook but once. I met him one morning riding to hounds with Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha. As soon as he sees me he trots his horse up to where I was standing and holds out his hand. 'Jeremy,' says he, 'I want to shake hands with you. You're a splendid specimen of the British farmer.' 'Thank you, your Grace,' I says; 'and you're a splendid specimen of the British Dook,' for I was never afraid of speaking my mind to anyone. At that his Grace bursts out laughin', and so did Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha too. 'Let me introduce you to my two daughters,' says he. So he introduces me, and I can tell you I stood up to 'em like a man, though I did keep my hat in my hand all the time. 'Well, Jeremy,' says he, 'you've got your farm in tip-top condition'; and then he begins talking about putting up some new buildings, as me and the agent had been talking over before. 'We'll put 'em up next spring,' says his Grace; 'and remember, Jeremy, that in all that concerns the development of this farm you have me behind you.' 'I've never forgotten it, your Grace,' I says, 'and I never shall. And I'm not the only one who remembers it. _The land_ remembers it too, your Grace,' I says. 'I hope it does, Jeremy,' says he, 'for I love it.' And I never see a young lady look prettier than Lady Agatha did when she heard her father say them words."

I had heard this story so often from Farmer Jeremy, and always with the same reference to Lady Agatha at the end, that I was familiar with every word of it. He was growing old, and I believe that in the course of the year he managed to tell the story a hundred times over. "I was coming home from market last Saturday," said he, "and a lot of other farmers was in the same compartment with me. We begins talkin' about the Dook, and I happened to tell 'em about that time when I met his Grace with Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha. There was a chap sitting in one corner as didn't belong to our lot, and as soon as he hears the Dook's name mentioned he drops his paper and begins listening. Well, I never see such a rage anywhere as that man got into when I told 'em how I kept my hat in my hand while talking to the ladies. Regular insultin' is what he was; and I can tell you I never came nearer giving a man one in the eye than I did him. I believe I'd ha' done it if there'd been room in the carriage for him to put up his hands and make a square fight on it. I don't say as he weren't a plucky chap too; for there wasn't a man in the carriage as couldn't ha' knocked his head off with the flat of his hand, if he'd had a mind to. 'Look here, you fellows,' he says, 'you're a lot of blasted idiots, that's what you are. It's because of the besotted ignorance of men like you that England has the worst land-system in the world. Slaverin' and grovellin' before a lot o' rotten Dooks--why, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! I'll bet that Dook o' yours and his two painted gals was mounted on fine horses and dressed up to the nines.' 'Of course they was,' I says, 'and so they ought to be.' 'Well,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes--and the paint?' 'Here,' I says, jumping up from my seat, 'you drop the paint, or I'll pitch you out o' that winder.' 'Well, then,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes?' 'I neither know nor care,' says I; 'so long as they was paid for, it's no business of mine or yourn who paid for 'em.' '_You paid for 'em_, you fool,' says he. 'Oh, indeed,' says I. 'And now, young man, perhaps you'll allow me to give you a word of advice.' 'Fire away,' says he. 'Well,' I says, 'the next time your missus has a washin' day, you just wait till she's made the copper 'ot, and then jump into it and boil yourself!'"

The "chap" in the railway carriage was by no means the only person to whom Mr Jeremy addressed this drastic advice. It was his usual mode of clinching an argument when his instincts supported a conclusion to which his intelligence could not find the way. This method of arriving at truth was especially useful in regard to politics and theology, in both of which Mr Jeremy took a lively, or even violent, interest. Needless to say, his political aversions were of the strongest, and Mr Lloyd George was the statesman who had to bear the hottest flame of Jeremy's wrath. More than once I have seen him fling his weekly paper on the floor with the words, "I wish this 'ere Lloyd George would jump into the copper and boil hisself"; and on my remarking that I thought this a rather inhuman suggestion, he would wave his arm round the room, in a manner to indicate the entire Liberal Party, and say, "I wish the whole lot on 'em would jump into coppers and boil themselves." As to theology, I seldom dared to address a hint of my heresies to Mr Jeremy. But on my once saying to another person, in his presence, something to the effect that I did not believe in eternal damnation, he quickly crossed over to where I was sitting, and, giving me a rather ugly dig with his powerful forefinger, said, "Look here! You just jump into the copper and boil yourself." A wise stupidity was the keynote of Mr Jeremy's life.

Another expression reserved for occasions when great emphasis was needed, was "a finished specimen." A thing, in Mr Jeremy's eyes, deserved this title when its general condition was so bad that nothing worse of its kind could be conceived, and the expression accordingly was only used after the ordinary resources of descriptive language had given out. It was applied to persons as well as to things. Mr Lloyd George was, naturally, "a finished specimen": so was the German Emperor: so was Dr Crippen: so was a lady of uncertain reputation who "had taken a cottage" in the neighbourhood. A wet harvest, a badly built hayrick, a measly pig, a feeble sermon by the curate, were all "finished specimens." Once when the curate, getting gravelled for lack of matter at the end of five minutes--for he was preaching _ex tempore_--abruptly concluded his sermon by promising to complete the subject next week, I heard Jeremy whisper to his wife, "Well, _he_'s a finished specimen, that he is." Nothing irritated the good man so much as an unfinished job, and the fact that a thing was unfinished was precisely what he meant to express when he called it "a finished specimen." A great deal of human language, especially philosophical language, seems to be constructed on the same principle.

Mr Jeremy was a regular church-goer. The Church in his eyes was part of the established order of Nature, on due observance of which the farmer's welfare depends, and merely extended into the next world those desirable results which sound instincts, punctuality, and "putting your back into it" produced in this. On week-days Mr Jeremy farmed the broad acres of the "Dook"; on Sundays he farmed Palestine, and occasionally drove a straight furrow clean across the back of the Universe. To both operations he applied the same methods, the same instincts, the same ideas. I confess that I have often smiled with the air of a superior person when listening to a highly trained Cathedral choir proclaiming to the strains of great music that "Moab was their washpot"; but when Mr Jeremy repeated the words in the village church I felt that he spoke the truth, and I went away with a clearer conception of Moab than I have ever gained from the works of Kuenen or Cheyne. "Moab," I reflected, "can be no other than the little field on the hillside, where Jeremy washes his sheep in the pool behind the willows." Again, I was morally certain that if Jeremy had lived in the neighbourhood of Edom he would have "cast out his shoe" upon that country, accurately aiming the missile at the head of any rascally Edomite who happened to be prowling about with a rabbit-snare in his pocket. So too when he shouted "Manasseh is mine"--he always shouted the Psalms--I was sure that Manasseh really was his, in a tenant-farmer way of speaking, and that next Thursday he would begin to rip up Manasseh with his great steam plough, and reap in due course a crop of forty bushels to the acre, paying the "Dook" a high rent for the privilege. Nor was Jeremy making any idle boast when he thundered out his further intentions, which were "to divide Sichem," "to mete out the valley of Succoth," and "to triumph" over Philistia. All this was Pragmatism of the purest water; you were sure he would keep his promise to the letter; you were glad for Sichem and Succoth, which were to be "divided" and "meted out," though perhaps a little sorry for the Philistines, who were to be "triumphed over," that a man like Jeremy should have undertaken the business; but you recognised that no better man for the job could be found anywhere than he. To be sure, Mr Jeremy, although he would have gladly boiled the whole Liberal Party in coppers, was much too tender-hearted to wish that anybody's little ones should be dashed against the stones; but I believe that in his innermost thought he launched the words against "them tarnation sparrers" and "that plague o' rats." On the whole, no one who listened to Mr Jeremy's repetition of these Psalms could doubt their entire appropriateness as a religious exercise for men such as he, or refrain from hoping that they would never be expunged from the Book of Common Prayer until the last British farmer had gone to church for the last time.