Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 123, vol. III, May 8, 1886

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH SERIES, NO. 123, VOL. III, MAY 8, 1886 ***

[Illustration:

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)

NO. 123.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]

COTTAGE IDEAS.

BY RICHARD JEFFERIES.

Passing by the kitchen-door, I heard Louisa, the maid, chanting to a child on her knee:

Feyther stole th’ Paason’s sheep; A merry Christmas we shall keep; We shall have both mutton and beef— _But we won’t say nothing about it_.

To rightly understand this rhyme, you must sing it with long-drawn emphasis on each word, lengthening it into at least two syllables; the first a sort of hexameter, the second a pentameter of sound:

Fey-ther sto-ole th’ Paa-son’s sheep.

The last line is to come off more trippingly, like an ‘aside.’ This old sing-song had doubtless been handed down from the times when the labourers really did steal sheep, a crime happily extinct with cheap bread. Louisa was one of the rare old sort—hard-working, and always ready; never complaining, but satisfied with any food there chanced to be; sensible and sturdy; a woman who could be thoroughly depended on. Her boxes were full of good dresses, of a solid, unassuming kind, such as would wear well—a perfect wardrobe. Her purse was always well supplied with money; she had money saved up, and she sent money to her parents: yet her wages, until late years, had been small. In doing her duty to others, she did good to herself. A duchess would have been glad to have her in her household. She had been in farmhouse service from girlhood, and had doubtless learned much from good housewives; farmers’ wives are the best of all teachers; and the girls, for their own sakes, had much better be under them than wasting so much time learning useless knowledge at compulsory schools.

Freckles said, when he came in, He never would enter a tawny skin,

was another of her rhymes. Freckles come in with summer, but never appear on a dark skin, so that the freckled should rejoice in these signs of fairness.

Your father, the elderberry, Was not such a gooseberry As to send in his bilberry Before it was dewberry.

Some children are liable to an unpleasant complaint at night; for this, there is a certain remedy. A mouse is baked in the oven to a ‘scrump,’ then pounded to powder, and this powder administered. Many ladies still have faith in this curious medicine; it reminds one of the powdered mummy, once the great cure of human ills. Country-places have not always got romantic names—Wapse’s Farm, for instance, and Hog’s Pudding Farm. Wapse is the provincial for wasp.

Country girls are not all so shrewd as Louisa; we heard of two—this was some time since—who, being in service in London, paid ten shillings each to Madame Rachel for a bath to be made beautiful for ever. Half a sovereign out of their few coins! On the other hand, town servants are well dressed and have plenty of finery, but seldom have any reserve of good clothing, such as Louisa possessed. All who know the country, regret the change that has been gradually coming over the servants and the class from which they are supplied. ‘Gawd help the pore missis as gets hold of _you_!’ exclaimed a cottage-woman to her daughter, whose goings-on had not been as they should be: ‘God help the poor mistress who has to put up with you!’ A remark that would be most emphatically echoed by many a farmer’s wife and country resident. ‘Doan’t you stop, if her hollers at ’ee,’ said another cottage-mother to her girl, just departing for service—that is, don’t stop if you don’t like it; don’t stop if your mistress finds the least fault. ‘Come along home, if you don’t like it.’ Home to what? In this instance, it was a most wretched hovel, literally built in a ditch; no convenience, no sanitation; and the father a drunkard, who scarcely brought enough money indoors to supply bread.

You would imagine that a mother in such a position would impress upon her children the necessity of endeavouring to do something. For the sake of that spirit of independence in which they seem to take so much pride, one would suppose they would desire to see their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. ‘You come home if you don’t like it;’ and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half-starved on potatoes and weak tea—stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world—your birthright—your character. Strange advice it was for a mother to give.

Nor is the feeling confined to the slatternly section, but often exhibited by very respectable cottagers indeed.

‘My mother never would go out to service—she _wouldn’t_ go,’ said a servant to her mistress, one day talking confidentially.

‘Then what did she do?’ asked the mistress, knowing they were very poor people.

‘Oh, she stopped at home.’

‘But how did she live?’

‘Oh, her father had to keep her. If she wouldn’t go out, of course he had to somehow.’

This mother would not let her daughter go to one place because there was a draw-well on the premises; and her father objected to her going to another because the way to the house lay down a long and lonely lane. The girl herself, however, had sense enough to keep in a situation; but it was distinctly against the feeling at her home; yet they were almost the poorest family in the place. They were very respectable, and thought well of in every way, belonging to the best class of cottagers.

Unprofitable sentiments! injurious sentiments—self-destroying; but I always maintain that sentiment is stronger than fact, and even than self-interest. I see clearly how foolish these feelings are, and how they operate to the disadvantage of those whom they influence. Yet I confess that were I in the same position, I should be just as foolish. If I lived in a cottage of three rooms, and earned my bread by dint of arm and hand under the sun of summer and the frost of winter; if I lived on hard fare, and, most powerful of all, if I had no hope for the future, no improvement to look forward to, I should feel just the same. I would rather my children shared my crust, than fed on roast-beef in a stranger’s hall. Perhaps the sentiment in my case might have a different origin, but in effect it would be similar. I should prefer to see my family about me—the one only pleasure I should have—the poorer and the more unhappy, the less I should care to part with them. This may be foolish, but I expect it is human nature.

English folk don’t ‘cotton’ to their poverty at all; they don’t eat humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other, always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his rights. To me, it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I hope they never will be—an evil day that—if it ever came—for the Anglo-Saxon race. There always seemed to me to be something peculiarly repulsive in the doctrine of the old Catechism, once so studiously worked into the minds of the villagers by dint of constant repetition, teaching them to be satisfied ‘To do their duty in the station to which it had pleased God to call them’—that is, to hedge and ditch and wash greasy plates all their lives, according as they were male or female, handmaids or man-jacks. To touch hats and forelocks, to bob courtesies (not out of courtesy as equals, but in sign of low degree). To be lowly of spirit before clay clad in broadcloth—a species of idolatry—to beat down and destroy those inward feelings of independence natural to all. Anything more opposed to that onward movement in which the hopes of the human race are bound up, it would be impossible to conceive.

One girl prided herself very much upon belonging to a sort of club or insurance—if she died, her mother would receive ten pounds. Ten pounds, ten golden sovereigns, was to her such a magnificent sum, that she really appeared to wish herself dead, in order that it might be received. She harped and talked and brooded on it constantly. If she caught cold, it didn’t matter, she would say, her mother would have ten pounds. It seemed a curious reversal of ideas, but it is a fact that poor folk in course of time come to think less of death than money. Another girl was describing to her mistress how she met the carter’s ghost in the rickyard; the wagon-wheel went over him; but he continued to haunt the old scene, and they met him as commonly as the sparrows.

‘Did you ever speak to him?’

‘Oh no. You mustn’t speak to them; if you speak to them, they’ll fly at you.’

In winter, the men were allowed to grub up the roots of timber that had been thrown, and take the wood home for their own use; this kept them in fuel the winter through without buying any. ‘But they don’t get _paid_ for that work.’ She considered it quite a hardship that they were not paid for taking a present. Cottage people do look at things in such a curious crooked light! A mother grumbled because the vicar had not been to see her child, who was ill. Now, she was not a church-goer, and cared nothing for the Church or its doctrines—that was not it—she grumbled so terribly because ‘it was his place to come.’

A lady went to live in a village for health’s sake, and having heard so much of the poverty of the farmer’s man, and how badly his family were off, thought that she should find plenty who would be glad to pick up extra shillings by doing little things for her. First, she wanted a stout boy to help to draw her Bath-chair, while the footman pushed behind, it being a hilly country. Instead of having to choose between half-a-dozen applicants, as she expected, the difficulty was to discover anybody who would even take such a job into consideration. The lads did not care about it; their fathers did not care about it; and their mothers did not want them to do it. At one cottage there were three lads at home doing nothing; but the mother thought they were too delicate for such work. In the end, a boy was found, but not for some time. Nobody was eager for any extra shilling to be earned in that way. The next thing was somebody to fetch a yoke or two of spring-water daily. This man did not care for it, and the other did not care for it; and even one who had a small piece of ground and kept a donkey and water-butt on wheels for the very purpose, shook his head. He always fetched water for folk in the summer when it was dry, never fetched none at that time of year—he could not do it. After a time, a small shopkeeper managed the yoke of water from the spring for her—_his_ boy could carry it; the labourers could not. He was comparatively well to do, yet he was not above an extra shilling.

This is one of the most curious traits in the character of cottage folk—they do not care for small sums; they do not care to pick up sixpences. They seem to be _afraid of obliging people_—as if to do so, even to their own advantage, would be against their personal honour and dignity. In London, the least trifle is snapped up immediately, and there is a great crush and press for permission to earn a penny, and that not in very dignified ways. In the country, it is quite different. Large fortunes have been made out of matches; now your true country cottager would despise such a miserable fraction of a penny as is represented by a match. I heard a little girl singing—

Little drops of water, little grains of sand.

It is these that make oceans and mountains; it is pennies that make millionaires. But this the country-man cannot see. Not him alone either; the dislike to little profits is a national characteristic, well marked in the farmer, and indeed in all classes. I, too, must be humble, and acknowledge that I have frequently detected the same folly in myself, so let it not be supposed for an instant that I set up as a censor; I do but delineate. Work for the cottager must be work to please him; and to please him, it must be the regular sort to which he is accustomed, which he did beside his father as a boy, which _his_ father did, and _his_ father before him; the same old plough or grub-axe, the same milking, the same identical mowing, if possible in the same field. He does not care for any newfangled jobs: he does not recognise them, they have no _locus standi_—they are not established. Yet he is most anxious for work, and works well, and is indeed the best labourer in the world. But it is the national character. To understand a nation, you must go to the cottager.

The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager, the character stands out in the coarsest relief; in the cottager, you get to ‘bed-rock,’ as the Americans say; there’s the foundation. Character runs upwards, not downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the cottager, but the nature of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat. The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the mansion. The labouring man cannot quickly alter his ways. Can the manufacturer? All alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster visits their persistence. It is English human nature.

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XXV.

They had reached the top of the stone steps, when two voices were borne upon them from the two ends of the corridor opposite. The first was Mr Dupuy’s. ‘Where is she?’ it said.—‘Mrs Pereira, where’s Nora? You don’t mean to say this is true that Tom tells me—that you’ve actually gone and let her sit out a dance with that conceited nigger fellow, Dr Whitaker? Upon my word, my dear madam, what this island is coming to nowadays is really more than I can imagine.’

The second voice was a louder and blander one. ‘My son, my son,’ it said, in somewhat thick accents, ‘my dear son, Wilberforce Clarkson Whitaker! Where is he? Is he in de garden? I want to introduce him to de governor’s lady. De governor’s lady has been graciously pleased to express an interes in de inheritor of de tree names most closely bound up wit de great social revolution, in which I have had de honour to be de chief actor, for de benefit of millions of my fellow-subjecks.—Walkin’ in de garden, is he, wit de daughter of my respected friend, de Honourable Teodore Dupuy of Orange Garden? Ha, ha! Dat’s de way wit de young dogs—dat’s de way wit dem! Always off walkin’ in de garden wit de pretty ladies. Ha, ha, ha! I doan’t blame dem!’

Dr Whitaker, his face on fire and his ears tingling, pushed on rapidly down the very centre of the garden, taking no heed of either voice in outward seeming, but going straight on, with Nora on his arm, till he reached the open window-doors that led directly into the big ballroom. There, seething in soul, but outwardly calm and polite, he handed over his partner with a conventional smile to Captain Castello, and turning on his heel, strode away bitterly across the ballroom to the outer doorway. Not a few people noticed him as he strode off in his angry dignity, for Tom Dupuy had already been blustering—with his usual taste—in the corridors and refreshment room about his valiant threat of soundly horsewhipping the woolly-headed mulatto. In the vestibule, the doctor paused and asked for his dust-coat. A negro servant, in red livery, grinning with delight at what he thought the brown man’s discomfiture, held it up for him to put his arms into. Dr Whitaker noticed the fellow’s malevolent grin, and making an ineffectual effort to push his left arm down the right arm sleeve, seized the coat angrily in his hand, doubled it up in a loose fold over his elbow, and then, changing his mind, as an angry man will do, flung it down again with a hasty gesture upon the hall table. ‘Never mind the coat,’ he said fiercely. ‘Bring round my horse! Do you hear, fellow? My horse, my horse! This minute, I tell you!’

The red-liveried servant called to an invisible negro outside, who soon returned with the doctor’s mountain pony.

‘Better take de coat, sah,’ the man in livery said with a sarcastic guffaw. ‘Him help to proteck your back an’ sides from Mistah Dupuy, him horsewhip!’

Dr Whitaker leapt upon his horse, and turned to the man with a face livid and distorted with irrepressible anger. ‘You black scoundrel, you!’ he cried passionately, using the words of reproach that even a mulatto will hurl in his wrath at his still darker brother, ‘do you think I’m running away from Tom Dupuy’s miserable horsewhip? I’m not afraid of a hundred fighting Dupuys and all their horsewhips.—You black image, you! how dare you speak to me? How dare you?—how dare you?’ And he cut out at him viciously in impotent rage with the little riding-whip he held in his fingers.

The negro laughed again, a loud hoarse laugh, and flung both his hands up with open fingers in African derision. Dr Whitaker dug his spurless heel deep into his horse’s side, sitting there wildly in his evening dress, and turned his head in mad despair out towards the outer darkness. The moon was still shining brightly overhead, but by contrast with the lights in the gaily illuminated ballroom, the path beneath the bamboo clumps in the shrubbery looked very gloomy, dark, and sombre.

Two or three of the younger men, anxious to see whether Tom Dupuy would get up ‘a scene’ then and there, crowded out hastily to the doorway, to watch the nigger fellow ride away for his life for fear of a horsewhipping. As they stood in the doorway, peering into the darkness after the retreating upright figure, there came all at once, with appalling suddenness, a solitary vivid flash of lightning, such as one never sees outside the tropics, illuminating with its awful light the whole length of the gardens and the gully beneath them. At the same second, a terrific clap of thunder seemed to burst, like innumerable volleys of the heaviest artillery, right above the roof of the governor’s bungalow. It was ghastly in its suddenness and in its strength. No one could say where the lightning struck, for it seemed to have struck on every side at once: all that they saw was a single sheet of all-pervading fire, in whose midst the mulatto and his horse stood silhouetted out in solid black, a statuesque group of living sculpture, against the brilliant fiery background. The horse was rearing, erect on his hind-legs; and Dr Whitaker was reining him in and patting his neck soothingly with hand half lifted. So instantaneous was the flash, indeed, that no motion or change of any sort was visible in the figures. The horse looked like a horse of bronze, poised in the air on solid metal legs, and merely simulating the action of rearing.

For a minute or two, not a soul spoke a word, or broke in any way the deathless silence that succeeded that awful and unexpected outburst. The band had ceased playing as if by instinct, and every person in the whole ballroom stood still and looked one at another with mute amazement. Then, by a common impulse, they pressed all out slowly together, and gazed forth with wondering eyes upon the serene moonlight. The stars were shining brightly overhead: the clap had broken from an absolutely clear sky. Only to northward, on the very summits of the highest mountains, a gathering of deep black clouds rolled slowly onward, and threatened to pass across the intervening valley. Through the profound silence, the ring of Dr Whitaker’s horse’s hoofs could be heard distinctly down below upon the solid floor of the mountain pathway.