Part 3

Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten village law; the other comes about by circumstance, which provides that whether we like it or not--and, on the whole, I am pretty sure that we do like it--we are simply a large family. I don’t necessarily mean that everybody is related to everybody else, though as a matter of fact he is, but rather that everybody, from the time he was anybody, has always known everybody else intimately: called him or her by his Christian name--within limits--known the exact state of his wardrobe, the extent of his earnings, the state of his pocket; what he had for dinner, or will have to-morrow, where he has been, what he was doing, whom he is courting, or by whom he is courted--and so on. I should fail entirely to make plain the sense in which this extreme and (to a townsman) extraordinary intimacy must be understood if I had not in reserve one crowning example of it, beyond which I defy anybody to carry intimacy. It is, then, the plain and literal fact that everybody in the village knows, or can find out, exactly the amount, condition, value and period of recurrence of everybody else’s underwear. There is no exception to that. It is, it can be, it must be exposed to view and subject to criticism every Monday afternoon in the garden of every cottage. When you have a community with such a mutual knowledge among its members, how can you help their taking each other seriously?

Two of the fundamentals of village life have been expounded, I hope: 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.