Part 3

Besides, he wanted a cottage not a mile away, but near to his work, so that he might go home to dinner and see how his wife was getting on. If he was growing old, she was older; and what was worse, she was subject to epileptic fits. There were days when he worried about her all the time while he was at work, and went home uneasily, dreading to find her fallen down in a fit. It was necessary, therefore, that if he moved it should be not far away. His last move had been in the wrong direction--from the adjoining bluff to a hollow further down stream--and now he desired to get back.

One of the steep and narrow lanes mentioned above is that which runs down beside this garden, where Bettesworth's work lay. It is picturesque enough, beneath its deep banks and hedgerows and overhung by my garden trees; but that is of no moment here. Within Bettesworth's memory it afforded access even for a waggon right down to "the Lake," and so over into the meadow opposite; but the last hundred yards of it, from Mrs. Skinner's cottage downwards, have long been washed out into a mere foot-track, deeply sunk between its banks, swooping down precipitously to the stream-level, and scarce two feet wide. So you emerge from the sand cliffs, and the valley is before you. Then the footpath winds along to the left (eastwards), having the cliff on one hand and the stream on the other, to a wider stretch, until with this for its best approach you come to a little hovel of three rooms and a lean-to shed, standing with its back walls close in against the sandy cliff.

At the period we are dealing with, this cottage had a poverty-stricken appearance, upon which Bettesworth himself had been wont to comment severely, though the place was in reality no worse than others beyond it and elsewhere in the parish. But it had suffered from utter neglect under the previous tenant, a thriftless Irishman, while, after the Irishman left, it stood empty for a time, and looked like falling quite derelict. Then, however, the landlord had a few repairs done, and at the end of September, to my amazement, I heard from Bettesworth that he had taken it. He would save eighteen-pence a week by the change: the new rent was only two shillings.

Ought I to have expostulated? Perhaps I should have done so, but for the queer expression in the old man's face when telling me his intention. There was some shame, but more of dogged defiance. "You think what you like," so I interpreted it--"that's the place I'm going to." He was armed, too, with testimony in favour of the cottage.

"Skinner" (the bricklayer) "says he don't see why it shouldn't make a very nice little place for two. He done up the roof there t'other week, and he ought to know." Later, the old man repeated Skinner's opinion, and added, "I think _I_ can make it comfortable. Ye see, there en't bin nobody to try before."

This was true enough. The Irishman's tenancy had not in any sense improved the cottage. The place could not be worse used, and it might conceivably be fairly habitable in more careful hands.

During the first week in October Bettesworth effected his removal. It was an inauspicious time. He had been counting upon the stream-bed for a roadway along which to cart his things, so as to avoid scrambling up and down the devious pathways and tracks that led to the cottage, but, unfortunately, the stream this week was in flood. A cart might, indeed, have struggled along it, and one was, in fact, bespoken--Jack Crawte's, to wit; but at the appointed time the cart failed to arrive, and upon Bettesworth's going to inquire for it, he discovered that the Crawtes were all gone into the town to the fair.

Next day they promised to come "by-and-by." Bettesworth accepted the promise, but he also chartered two donkey-carts, which were really more suitable for getting out from the first cottage into one lane, and then round and about, up and down, to the head of the gully by Mrs. Skinner's. Farther than that even donkey-carts were useless. For the last and worst hundred yards nothing but a wheelbarrow or a strong back could be of any use.

Fortunately (in these circumstances), poor old Bettesworth's household goods were not many, nor yet magnificent; yet still they were enough for him to manage. The main of them were shifted on the Thursday, and I should not like to say how many times that day the old man slaved down the gorge with loaded wheelbarrow and up with it empty; but Mrs. Skinner witnessed his doings, and complimented him.

"Why, Freddy," she said--"why, Freddy, you'd kill half the young uns _now_, old as you be."

There should have been a helper--one Moses Cook, familiarly known as "Little Moser"; but little Moser was not a success. On the Wednesday, promising to lend a hand "in five minutes," he delayed coming until he had found time to get drunk and then arrived with the proposal that Bettesworth should give him a pint to start with. "_Git_ out o' my way!" was Bettesworth's reply. The next day the little man was willing, but useless.

"Couldn't even git up there by ol' Dame Skinner's with a empty barrer! I says to 'n, 'Git in an' let me wheel ye up!' I says. Made me that wild! Why, I'd lifted a chest into the barrer all by myself--and _he_ must ha' weighed a hundred and a quarter, with what there was in 'n, ye know--and wheeled 'n down. And then to see this little feller. 'You be in my way,' I says. 'You better go 'ome and sit down, and then p'raps we shall be able to git something done!' I _was_ wild. I told 'n, 'They says Gawd made man in His own image--you must be a bloomin' counterfeit!'"

At one time there was a threat of rain, and Bettesworth "whacked all the beddin' he could on to the barrer, and down and in with it." Fortunately, the rain held off.

Towards night the cart came into action. It brought a load or two of firewood--not along the stream itself, but beside it, through the flooded meadow. The wood was tipped out on to the raised bank across the stream, just opposite Bettesworth's new home, there to remain for the night. But the old man could not rest with it there.

"I got all that across," he said, "and into the dry. Crawte couldn't hardly believe it when I told 'n this mornin'. But I _did_. Fetched it across in the dark." It was an almost incredible feat, for the night was of the blackest, and the stream four or five feet wide. "And then, when I got in, I had to put up the bedstead, with only the ol' gal to help me. An' if you told her one thing, it only seemed to make her forget to do something else. Talk about _tired_! I never had nothin' all that time--not even half a pint o' beer. Ye see, there wa'n't nobody I could send, an' I couldn't spare time to go myself, 'relse I _should_ ha' liked a glass o' beer. But I never had nothin' not afore I'd done. Then I had some tea, but I was too tired to eat. P'r'aps, if I'd ha' been able to have half a pint earlier, I might ha' bin able to eat; but, as 'twas, I couldn't eat. And now this mornin' my back and shoulders aches--with wheelin' down that gully, ye know."

As it is not mentioned elsewhere, I may as well say here that Bettesworth's endeavours to make this little place habitable and respectable were for a time fairly successful. As it should have been explained, after emerging from the gully the public footpath runs close in front of the doorway of the place, leaving some eight feet of garden between itself and the stream. Of old, in the Irishman's time, this garden was an entanglement of weeds and stunted cabbages, while the footpath was unswept, disgusting, and often blocked with a pail of ashes or other household refuse. But now a spirit of order had appeared on the scene. The cabbage-plot became comely; in due season old-fashioned cottage flowers--pinks and nasturtiums--appeared in two tiny borders under the windows on either side of the door, and the mean doorway itself was beautified by a rough but sufficient arbour of larch-posts before it, up which "canary-creeper" found its way. Accordingly, I heard from time to time, but neglected to set down, how this and that wayfarer had praised the old man's improvements. Did not the Vicar himself say (I seem to remember Bettesworth's telling me so with much gratification) that he would never have believed the place could be made to look so well? Of the inside, perhaps, not so much could be said; but even this was passable at first, before the old wife's breakdown spoilt all. For several years, in fact, Bettesworth was, I believe, very happy in this cottage. At any rate, it gave him scope for labour, and he always liked that. He had hardly been in possession a week before he was talking of an improvement much to his mind.

"There's a rare lot o' capital soil in the lake under they withies just against my garden," he said; and he proposed taking it out to enrich his garden.

"It'll be good for the lake, too," I suggested.

"Yes," he replied, "it wants clearin' out. Why, in some places there en't no lake, and half the water that comes down got to overflow and make floods."

IV

And now, Bettesworth being settled in this hovel, his story begins at last to move forwards. For a while, indeed, little, if any, change in the man himself will be discernible. We shall be aware only of the quiet lapse of time as the seasons steal over him, and leave him older, or as the progress of public events is dimly reflected in occasional scraps of his conversation. And even of public events not much will be heard. Such things, which had never greatly concerned Bettesworth, were less likely than ever to attract his attention now. For five days in the week he rarely got farther from home than the lower half of the lane, where it degenerates into the gully between my garden and his cottage. On Saturday afternoons he journeyed into the town to get a shave and do his shopping; on Sunday evenings he generally went to the public-house; and as this was all he saw of the world, it is no matter for surprise if his interests remained extremely parochial.

And yet his ignorance of what was happening did sometimes surprise me. Of course, I know that what was wanting was the opportunity of enlightenment, and that he was not naturally deficient in the instincts that make for it. His appreciation of Nansen's adventures may be cited as a proof that he was ready and even eager to be informed. But for all that, it is true that the affairs which excited the rest of the world usually left him undisturbed, and the public noise needed to be a great one to reach his ears. Mr. Chamberlain's protectionist propaganda was not loud enough, incredible though that may seem. As a peasant, Bettesworth had a theory which I have often heard him affirm, that, for farmers to prosper, "bread never ought to be no less than a shillin' a gallon," so that I expected to hear him at least talk of "fiscal reform." But he never did. The proposal was months old when I at last broached the subject to him, and all he said was, "Oh dear! we don't want no taxes on food!" as if he had never heard that such a thing was projected. And it is my firm belief that to the day of his death he knew only what little I told him about it, and would hardly have been able to say where he had heard the name of Chamberlain. His home was down there by the stream bed; his work was half-way up the lane. Walking to it, he might hear Mrs. Skinner talking to her pigs; walking back, he could see Crawte's cows turned out in the meadow at the bottom of the valley. He never read a newspaper, and how should he have learnt anything about the political ferment which was spreading through the towns of all England, and engaging the attention of the whole world?

At the end of 1899, however, he had not long been in his new dwelling before his attention was effectually arrested by the war in South Africa; and my next note is a remark of his on this subject, which shows him taking not quite a parochial view of the situation. He did not approve of war. Several years previously, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American affair, he had spoken uneasily of the consequent rise in the price of bread, and his concern now may therefore be imagined. Still, there was one bright spot.

"There's one thing I be glad of," he said: "all they reserves called out. There never no business to be none o' they in the country."

His reason was that in time of peace the reserves, with their retaining pay, had been wont to undersell the civilian workman in the labour market, and that such competition was unfair.

This, of course, was soon forgotten in the interest of the war itself. Our parish, so near to Aldershot, sent out perhaps a disproportionate number of its young men to the front, men whom Bettesworth knew, whose fathers and mothers were his good friends, and at whose deaths, now and then announced, he would grimly shut his lips. Morning after morning he asked, "Any news of the war, sir?" and listened gravely to what could be told. But he did not so much think as feel about it all. He knew nothing, cared nothing, about the policy which had led up to hostilities; he was too ill-informed to be infected by the raw imperialism of the day; his attitude was simply "national." "Our country"--that was his expression--was in difficulties, and he longed to see the difficulties overcome. Such was his simple instinctive position, and it excused in him some feelings which would have been less pardonable in a more enlightened man. At the close he would have liked to shoot without pity President Kruger and the Boer Generals, as the enemies of "our country."

But how ignorant of the facts he was at the beginning of the war! Of our many talks on the subject I seem to have preserved only one, but that is so strange that now I can hardly believe in its accuracy.

_December 16, 1899._--Dated the 16th of December, 1899, it states that Bettesworth had heard the week's disastrous news from the seat of war, and was letting off his dismay in exclamatory fashion. "Six hundred missin'! Look at that. What do that _missin'_ mean?" His tone implied that he knew only too well.

I said, "Most likely it means that they are prisoners."

And then he said, "Ah, prisoners--or else burnt."

It was my turn to exclaim. "Burnt? No, no! They are prisoners."

"But they burns 'em, some says."

Heaven only knows where he could have picked up such an idea. As the war proceeded, he kept himself fairly up to date with its main events by listening to other men's talk. He used, as we know, to go to the public-house on Sunday evenings "to get enlightenment to the mind;" and there is mention in the next fragment of another source of information which he valued. To reach that, however, we have to enter another year--the year 1900.

V

_February 13, 1900._--The winter was passing by, with the war, indeed, to make it memorable to us, but uneventfully at home. January, like December, had been mild--too mild, some people said, of whom, however, Bettesworth was not one. February set in with more severity of weather. On the third we had snow, and in the succeeding days frost followed, and the roads grew slippery.

These things no doubt provided Bettesworth with topics for many little chats I must have enjoyed with him, although I saved no reminder of any of them. But about the middle of the month a circumstance came to my knowledge which made his good-tempered gossip seem rather remarkable. I could not but admire that a man so situated should be able to talk with such urbanity.

He had been at the barber's the previous evening, where another man was discoursing at large about the war. And said Bettesworth:

"I _do_ like to hear anything like that. Or if they'll read a newspaper. There I could 'bide listenin' all night. And if anybody else was to open their mouths, I should be like enough to tell 'em to shut up. Because, if you goes to hear anything, _hear_ it. Same as at church or chapel or a entertainment: _you_ goes to listen, an' then p'r'aps four or five behind ye gets to talkin'. I always says, if you goes anywhere, go and be quiet. You en't obliged to go, but when you do go, behave yourself."

The talkers, I might have reminded Bettesworth, are not always "behind ye"; there are those who take front seats who might profit by his little homily on good manners. But he only meant that the discourtesy is the more disturbing, because it is the more audible, when it comes from behind.

He passed easily on to a discussion of the weather, and again his superlative good sense was to the fore. On Sunday, he said, he had tried to persuade his neighbours--working-men, like himself, only younger--to bring their shovels and scatter sand on the path down the gully, which was coated with ice. Already he had done a longish piece of it himself, but much remained to do. Several men had "went up reg'lar busters," and "children and young gals" on their way to church had fallen down. It would be a public service to besprinkle the path with sand. So Bettesworth made his suggestion to his neighbours--"four or five of 'em. They was hangin' about: hadn't got nothin' to do." But no. They shrugged their shoulders and walked away. It was no business of theirs. They even laughed at the old man for the trouble he had already taken, for which no one would pay him. And now, in telling me about it, it was his neighbours' want of public spirit that annoyed him. They had not come up to his standard of the behaviour meet for a labouring man.

Who would have imagined that, while he was telling me this, and for days previously, he was in a state of severe mental distress, aggravated by bodily fatigue? I had no suspicion of it, and was surprised enough when told by a third person. But it was true--too true. He admitted it readily when I asked him. His wife was ill again, worse than she had been for three years, since the time when she fell down in an epileptic fit and broke her wrist. She had had many minor attacks during the interval, but this was serious now.

As I have already told the poor old woman's story, or at least this part of it, in another place, I may not repeat it here; but for the sake of continuity the episode must be summarized. Three years earlier Bettesworth had obtained an order for his wife's admission to the workhouse infirmary. Hateful though the merest suspicion of benefiting by parish aid was to him, there had been no other course open at that time; for what could he do for an old woman with a broken limb, and a malady that made her for the time half-witted? And yet, owing to overcrowding at the infirmary, amazed and indignant he had brought her home again on the fourth day, because she had been lodged and treated as a common pauper. Consequently I knew that he must be at extremities now, when it came out that he was deciding again to send the old lady to the infirmary. But he was at his wits' end what to do for her. He could not afford to stay at home from work; yet while he was away she was alone, since her condition and temper made neighbours reluctant to help. Sometimes the fear haunted him that she would meet a violent death, falling in a fit on to the fire, perhaps; sometimes he dreaded that he would have to put her finally away into an asylum. What he endured in the long agonizing nights when her fits were upon her, in the silent winter evenings when he sat for hours watching her pain and wondering what to do, no one will ever know. As best he could, he used at such times to wash her and dress her himself--he with his fumbling fingers and dim eyes; and wanting sleep, wanting the food that neither of them could prepare, alone and unknown, he struggled to keep in order his miserable cottage. Almost a week must have passed like this before I heard of the trouble, and asked him about it. Then he laid his difficulties before me, and asked for my advice.

To men in Bettesworth's position it is always an embarrassment to comply with the formalities of official business. They do not see the reason, and they feel keenly the wearisomeness, of the steps which must be taken to gain their end. Bettesworth now seemed paralyzed; he had forgotten how to go on; moreover, he could not be satisfied--although there was a new infirmary--that his wife would be more decently treated there than in the old one. If only he could be sure of that! But of course he was not important enough to approach, himself, anyone so important as a guardian; and, accordingly, I undertook to make inquiries for him.

It is indeed a tedious business--I experienced it afterwards too--that of getting a sick person from this village into the local infirmary. It seemed that Bettesworth must lose at least a day's work in arranging for the removal of his wife. She could not be admitted to the house without a certificate from the parish doctor, who lived in the town, a mile and a half away. But the doctor might only attend upon Bettesworth's presenting an order to be obtained from the relieving officer, two miles away in the exactly opposite direction. The medical man would then come as soon as he found convenient, and Bettesworth would be provided with a certificate for his wife's removal to the infirmary. But he might not act upon that alone. With that in his possession, he would have to wait again upon the relieving officer, to get an order upon the workhouse master to admit the patient, and to arrange for a conveyance to take her away.

We talked it over, he and I, that afternoon, not cheered by the wild weather that was hourly worsening. If all went well on the morrow, Bettesworth would have some twelve miles of walking to do; but it was most likely that, between relieving officer and doctor, two or even three days would elapse before the desired relief would be accomplished. However, the immediate thing to do was clear enough: he must make his first visit to the relieving officer as soon as possible.

I forget on what grounds, but we agreed that it was useless to attempt anything that night; and since the officer would be off at eight in the morning for his day's duty in other places, Bettesworth proposed to be up betimes, and catch him at his office before he started. It would be just possible then, by hurrying, to get back over the three or four miles to the town, and find the doctor before he too should leave for the day. Otherwise there would be a sickening delay.

The whole thing was sickening already, in its inevitable mechanical clumsiness. Still, there was no help for it. The weather meanwhile was threatening hindrance. A small driving snow had set in in the afternoon, and was inclined to freeze as it fell; and for some time before dark the opposite side of the valley had become all but invisible, blotted out by the dreary whiteness of the storm. At nightfall, the weather seemed to turn wicked. Hours afterwards, as I sat listening to the howling gusts of wind, which puffed the smoke from out of my fire, and brought the snow with a crisp bristling sound against my window, I could not get out of my head the thought of Bettesworth, alone with his crazy wife down there in that cottage, or the fear that deep snow might prevent his morning's journey. And then it was that recollection of his recent quiet conversations came over me. So to have talked, keeping all this trouble to himself, while he listened to the war news, and did his best to make the footways passable--there was surely a touch of greatness in it.

And it makes no difference to my estimate of him that, after all, he did not go to the relieving officer the next morning. On the further progress of Mrs. Bettesworth's illness at this time my notebook is silent; but, as I recall now, she took a turn for the better that night, and by the morning was so improved that thought of the infirmary was given up.

VI