not far from “the white horse” is a little town upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. these are the last shops i am likely to pass in wiltshire, and it occurs to me that i should like to taste lardy cakes—which i last bought in wroughton fifteen years ago—before i leave the county. richard jefferies’ grandfather was “my lord lardy cake” in old swindon sixty years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the best essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which were permitted to be baked with them. in “amaryllis at the fair” they are mentioned with some indignity as a ploughboy’s delicacy. my lips water for them, and at the first bakery in —— i ask for some. the baker tells me he has sold the last one. he is a small, white-haired and white-bearded man with an expression of unctuous repose, assuredly a pillar of his chapel and possibly its treasurer, and though he himself will, by his own telling, have no more lardy cakes until the next morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his fellow-townsmen bakes them. i disbelieve the man of dough for all his conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and am rewarded for my disbelief by four lardy cakes for threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his accursed threshold. lardy cakes, i now discover for the first time,[246] have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision of much pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that one is enough at a time, and that four will, therefore, take a man quite a long way upon the roads of england.
at the next inn three labourers and the landlord are heated in conversation about some one not present.
“quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip leans against the counter, “’tis the third time this week that a tramp has been to his door, and by the looks of them they didn’t call for naught.”
“one of them didn’t, i know,” says the landlord. “he came in here once and asked for a job and left without a drink, but after he’d been to stegbert’s cottage he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild. and i heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights running in that rough patch behind the house. don’t you think the parson ought to hear of that? and what does he do for a living? he looks poor enough himself.”
“i don’t know. mr. jones is a kind-hearted fellow. he stopped my youngest in the street the other day and gave her a penny and measured her hair, and told her she’d have a yard of it some day. they tell me he hasn’t a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not even a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t a watch or a clock. what does he do with himself?”
“i reckon he’s mad,” says the third, chuckling, “and i don’t mind if he is. my old dog doesn’t need feeding at home since he’s been here. he doesn’t eat no meat himself neither. the widow nash was reckoning it up, and she says he spends four shillings a week——”
“and a shilling here regular,” interjects the landlord.
[247]
“on groceries, including one-and-six for tobacco. he has four loaves, and i know ‘kruger’ must have more than half of them.”
“and every other week he buys a postal order for two shillings and a penny stamp——”
“pint of mild, mister,” says a tall blear-eyed man who comes in, meekly followed by a small woman, dusty and in rags but neat, to whom he offers the tankard after nearly draining it himself.
“nice weather,” he ventures, smacking his lips.
“yes,” says the landlord discouragingly, and the carter leaves.
“everybody seems to be gone to the flower show,” continues the intruder, “and that’s where i’m going” (here he looks at his boots), “but the best way for sore feet is three days in a tap-room in some good sawdust.”
the wife sighs.
“the fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says her husband to the company, “is a cousin of mine twice removed, and i have done a bit in the show line myself. it’s a rum business. better than working in a brewery stables, though. me and my mate had to go because we got up so early that we burnt too many candles.”
the mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, and one says—
“they say them fat women eats hardly anything at all.”
“very small eater is daisy. but you see her food does her good. none of it’s wasted.”
“that’s it. her food agrees with her.”
the wife sighs.
“now there’s my missus here,” says the husband.[248] “she was one of these pretty gallus dancing-girls who get their fifteen shillings a week. her food don’t nourish her. now my brother used to laugh in publics for a pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint to stop.”
“oh, i can laugh after a pint,” says the wife, “but then i could just as easy cry, i worries so. there’s many a aching heart goes up and down that great western railway in the express trains.”
“i never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy mouth, short pipe, and head straight up behind from his neck.
“quite right,” says the husband. “my old girl here lives on the fat of the land and is always thin. her food don’t nourish her. there’s more harm done in the world by a discontented gut than anything else. i think of asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”
“like mr. jones over there,” says one of the labourers.
“mr. jones? what, my friend mr. william jones?” asks the tall man.
“is he a friend of yours?” asks the landlord, curiosity overpowering his natural caution with a man who is selling spectacles at a shilling a pair.
“he is, and i don’t mind letting any one know it. i’m very glad to see him settled down. he’s the only one along the road who hasn’t gone to the flower show to-day.” here the tall man calls for another tankard, which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to the small neat woman behind him. pleased to be civilly used, and warmed by the liquor, he tells the story of his friend, the little woman helping him out, and landlord and labourers adding some touches; and mr. jones him[249]self completed the picture during my few days in the village.
the man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the beggar satisfied away, and made presents to the children, and lived on six ounces of tobacco a week, is a native of zennor in cornwall. “wonderful place for pedlars is cornwall. the towns are so few and far between that the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when you do call you are sure of the best of treatment.” he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in a town in south devon, and for a time practised his trade there as an assistant. he was very clever at boxing and wrestling, and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a quarrel. but he was a queer youth and took violent likes and dislikes to men, and one day he dropped a boot and went out into the street and took a young gentleman by the arm and said to him: “excuse me, sir, you have passed this shop for five years nearly every day and i can’t stand it any longer.” whereupon he gave that young gentleman a beating. he was sent to prison; he lost his employment and went to sea. and at sea or else in foreign countries he stayed six years. he left the sea only because he broke an arm which had at length to be amputated above the elbow. he was a changed man and many thought then that he was mad. when he left the hospital it was december and bitter weather: he had only five shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. every day for a week he bought three loaves of bread and went out and fed the birds with them. when that week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and there he stayed until the spring. it was there that he fell in with the tall man who helped to tell his tale.[250] they left together and for some time he almost kept the two by begging, his lack of an arm ensuring his success. but he was not altogether to his companion’s taste, nevertheless. he would stop and smoke a pipe and admire the view when he was miles from anywhere and their object was to reach a town and find enough money to pay for lodgings. he would stand by a hedge, content for an hour to disentangle the bryony strands that were in danger of straying to the road, and to restore them to the hazel and thorn where their fellows ramped. he was willing to be foster-father to half the helpless fledglings that he found on the roadside. sleeping one night in a barn he could not be persuaded to leave until he had decided whether it was better to kill a spider who had a great appetite for flies or to leave it to fate. several he rescued from the web and then out of pity for the spider brought it flies already dead; but finding that these were not to its taste he left the difficulty unsolved and went sadly on his way. almost equal to his pitifulness was his dislike of work and his moral cowardice. nothing could persuade him to do any work, and such a coward was he that if he failed at the first house where he offered his laces for sale he would not try again in that village or town. yet he did not scruple to steal—even with a hint of physical violence—if he needed anything which chance presented to him in another man’s possession: but he stole only necessaries, having none of the acquisitiveness which is more common in their victims than in thieves. few men use leisure as well as he; perhaps no man was ever idle with less harm to his fellows. the rich could have learned many lessons at his feet: they must always be shooting or driving furiously or meddling with politics[251] or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept out of harm, however rich. how well this man would have employed money: he would have given it away!
by and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent gazings into their brown eyes as they stared at him by a stile still further reduced his necessities—he would touch no meat; so that his companion, finding him no longer of much use in spite of his possession of but one arm, left him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of time. it was now that jones remembered with horror a scene which had slumbered in his mind with the fear which it originally roused in youth. he and other boys were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the skinning and the cutting up, until their ears became familiar with the groans, the screams, the gurglings, the squelchings in the half-darkness of candle-light, the blood and white faces and the knife. but one day there was led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the may pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy hoofs to the tips of the horns that swayed as she walked. her breath made, as it were, a sacred space about her as the light of a human face will do. she stood quiet but uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous place, into which light only came in bars through a cobwebbed lattice and fell that day upon her white face, leaving in darkness the tall butcher and the imbecile assistant who held the rope by which the animal’s head was drawn down to the right level for a blow. the men were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they finished their talk about home rule. then the idiot tried to put her into the right position, but for a time could[252] not get her to see that her head must be drawn tight and somewhat askew against the oaken pillar. he only succeeded by patting her flanks and saying gently as if to a girl: “come along, daisy!” she lowed soft and bowed her head; the blow fell; she rolled to the ground and the butcher once more let loose the heavy scent of blood. the wholesome pretty beast, the familiar “come along, daisy!” and the blow and the scent came often into jones’ mind. he ate no meat, but made no attempt to proselytize; he simply retreated deeper and deeper into his childlike love of nature. the birds and the flowers and the creeping and running things he seemed to regard as little happy, charming, undeveloped human beings, looking down on them with infinite tenderness and a little amusement; with them alone was he quite at home. nature, as she presented herself to his simple senses, was but a fragrant, many-coloured, exuberant, chiefly joyous community, with which most men were not in harmony. silent for days and thinking only “green thoughts” under the branches of the wood, he came to demand, unconsciously, that there should be such a harmony. but he loved nature also because she had no ambiguity, told no lies, uttered no irony. sitting among flowers by running water he wore an expression of blessed satisfaction with his company which is not often seen at the friendliest table. he drew no philosophy from nature, no opinions, ideas, proposals for reform, but only the wisdom to live, happily and healthily and simply, himself.
i dare say modernity was in his blood, but no man seemed to belong less to our time. of history and science he knew nothing, of literature nothing; he had to make out the earth with his own eyes and heart. he had not[253] words for it, but he felt that whatever he touched was god. no myth or religion had any value to him. there were no symbols for him to use. the deities he surmised or smelt or tasted in the air or upon the earth had neither name nor shape. had he been able to think, he was the man to put our generation on the way to a new mythology. for all i know, he had the vision, the power of the seer, without the power of the prophet. a little more and perhaps he would have invaded christendom as st. paul invaded heathendom. yet i think he was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. the eye untroubled by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for example, the musing man can see nothing before him but a mist, but if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become visible. so this man saw with a clearness as of angelico, and in his memory violets and roses, trees and faces were as clear as if within his brain were another sun to light them. he had but to close his eyes to see these things, an innumerable procession of days and their flowers and their birds in the sky or on the bough. and this he had at no cost. he employed only such labour as was needed to make his bread and occasionally clothes and a pipe. nor did he merely ask alms of nature and civilization. he paid back countless charities to flower and bird and child and poorer men, and there was nothing against him of pain or sorrow or death inflicted. and as he was without religion so he was without patriotism. he had no country, knew nothing of men and events. asked by a person who saw him idle and did not observe his defect, whether he would not like to do something for his country, he replied: “i have no country like you, sir. i own[254] nothing; my people never did, that i know. i admire those that do, for i have been in many a country when i was a sailor, but never a one to beat england, let alone the west country when it’s haymaking time.”
he continued to beg with a free conscience, and was always willing to give away all that he had to one in more need. and now chance found him out and gave him ten shillings a week. he rented a cottage in this village, weeded his flower-borders, but let his vegetable-plots turn into poppy-beds. sometimes he wearied of his monotonous meals; he would then fast for a day or two, giving his food to the birds and mice, until his hearty appetite returned....
he did not stay long in the village. he was shy and suspicious of men, and except by the younger children he was not liked. he set out on his travels again, and is still on the road or—unlike most tramps—on the paths and green lanes, the simplest, kindest, and perhaps the wisest of men, indifferent to mobs, to laws, to all of us who are led aside, scattered and confused by hollow goods, one whom the last day of his full life will not find in a whirlpool of affairs, but ready to go—an outcast.
