Lark Rise to Candleford (33 page)

Others were less sincere, and some merely self-seeking
poseurs
who took to preaching as the only means of getting a little limelight shed on
their undistinguished lives. One such was a young shop assistant from the
market town, who came, stylishly dressed, with a bunch of violets in his
buttonhole, smoothing his well-oiled hair with his hand and shaking clouds of
scent from his large white handkerchief. He emphatically did not preach the
Word. His perfume and buttonhole and pseudo-cultured accent so worked upon the
brethren that, after he had gone, they for once forgot their rule of no criticism
and exclaimed: 'Did you ever see such a la-de-da in all your draggings-up?'

Then there was the elderly man who chose for his text: 'I
will sweep them off the face of the earth with the besom of destruction', and proceeded
to take each word of his text as a heading. '
I
will sweep them off the
face of the earth. I
will
sweep them off the face of the earth. I will
sweep
them off the face of the earth', and so on. By the time he had finished he had
expounded the nature of God and justified His ways to man to his own
satisfaction; but he made such a sad mess of it that the children's ears burned
with shame for him.

Some managed to be sincere Christians and yet quicker of wit
and lighter of hand. The host keeping the door one night was greeted by the
arriving minister with 'I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,'
and capped it with 'than dwell in the tents of the ungodly.'

Methodism, as known and practised there, was a poor people's
religion, simple and crude; but its adherents brought to it more fervour than
was shown by the church congregation, and appeared to obtain more comfort and
support from it than the church could give. Their lives were exemplary.

Many in the hamlet who attended neither church nor chapel and
said they had no use for religion, guided their lives by the light of a few
homely precepts, such as 'Pay your way and fear nobody'; 'Right's right and wrong's
no man's right'; 'Tell the truth and shame the devil', and 'Honesty is the best
policy'.

Strict honesty was the policy of most of them; although there
were a few who were said to 'find anything before 'tis lost' and to whom
findings were keepings. Children were taught to 'Know it's a sin to steal a
pin', and when they brought home some doubtful finding, saying they did not think
it belonged to anybody, their mothers would say severely, 'You knowed it didn't
belong to you, and what don't belong to you belongs to somebody else. So go and
put it back where you found it, before I gets the stick to you.'

Liars were more detested than thieves. 'A liar did ought to
have a good memory,' they would say, or, more witheringly, 'You can lock up
from a thief, but you can't from a liar.' Any statement which departed in the least
degree from plain fact was a lie; any one who ate a plum from an overhanging
bough belonging to a neighbour's tree was a thief. It was a stark code in which
black was black and white was white; there were no intermediate shades.

For the afflicted or bereaved there was ready sympathy. Had
the custom of sending wreaths to funerals been general then, as it is to-day,
they would certainly have subscribed their last halfpenny for the purpose. But,
at that time, the coffins of the country poor went flowerless to the grave, and
all they could do to mark their respect was to gather outside the house of
mourning and watch the clean-scrubbed farm wagon which served as a hearse set
out on its slow journey up the long, straight road, with the mourners following
on foot behind. At such times the tears of the women spectators flowed freely,
little children howled aloud in sympathy, and any man who happened to be near
broke into extravagant praise of the departed. 'Never speak ill of the dead'
was one of their maxims and they carried it to excess.

In illness or trouble they were ready to help and to give, to
the small extent possible. Men who had been working all day would give up their
night's rest to sit up with the ill or dying, and women would carry big bundles
of bed-linen home to wash with their own.

They carried out St. Paul's injunction to weep with those who
weep; but when it came to rejoicing with those who rejoiced they were less
ready. There was nothing they disliked more than seeing one of their number doing
better or having more of anything than themselves. A mother whose child was
awarded a prize at school, or whose daughter was doing better than ordinary in
service, had to bear many pin-pricks of sarcasm, and if a specially devoted
young married couple was mentioned, some one was bound to quote, 'My dear
to-day'll be my devil to-morrow.' They were, in fact, poor fallible human
beings.

The Rector visited each cottage in turn, working his way
conscientiously round the hamlet from door to door, so that by the end of the
year he had called upon everybody. When he tapped with his gold-headed cane at
a cottage door there would come a sound of scuffling within, as unseemly objects
were hustled out of sight, for the whisper would have gone round that he had
been seen getting over the stile and his knock would have been recognized.

The women received him with respectful tolerance. A chair was
dusted with an apron and the doing of housework or cooking was suspended while his
hostess, seated uncomfortably on the edge of one of her own chairs, waited for
him to open the conversation. When the weather had been discussed, the health
of the inmates and absent children inquired about, and the progress of the pig
and the prospect of the allotment crops, there came an awkward pause, during
which both racked their brains to find something to talk about. There was
nothing. The Rector never mentioned religion. That was looked upon in the
parish as one of his chief virtues, but it limited the possible topics of
conversation. Apart from his autocratic ideas, he was a kindly man, and he had
come to pay a friendly call, hoping, no doubt, to get to know and to understand
his parishioners better. But the gulf between them was too wide; neither he nor
his hostess could bridge it. The kindly inquiries made and answered, they had
nothing more to say to each other, and, after much 'ah-ing' and 'er-ing', he
would rise from his seat, and be shown out with alacrity.

His daughter visited the hamlet more frequently. Any fine
afternoon she might have been seen, gathering up her long, full skirts to mount
the stile and tripping daintily between the allotment plots. As a widowed clergyman's
only daughter, parochial visiting was, to her, a sacred duty; but she did not
come in any district-visiting spirit, to criticize household management, or
give unasked advice on the bringing up of children; hers, like her father's,
were intended to be friendly calls. Considering her many kindnesses to the
women, she might have been expected to be more popular than she was. None of
them welcomed her visits. Some would lock their doors and pretend to be out;
others would rattle their teacups when they saw her coming, hoping she would
say, as she sometimes did, 'I hear you are at tea, so I won't come in.'

The only spoken complaint about her was that she talked too
much. 'That Miss Ellison; she'd fair talk a donkey's hind leg off,' they would
say; but that was a failing they tolerated in others, and one to which they were
not averse in her, once she was installed in their best chair and some item of
local gossip was being discussed.

Perhaps at the root of their unease in her presence was the
subconscious feeling of contrast between her lot and theirs. Her neat little
figure, well corseted in; her dear, high-pitched voice, good clothes, and faint
scent of lily-of-the-valley perfume put them, in their workaday garb and all
blowsed from their cooking or water-fetching, at a disadvantage.

She never suspected she was unwanted. On the contrary, she
was most careful to visit each cottage in rotation, lest jealousy should arise.
She would inquire about every member of the family in turn, listen to extracts
from letters of daughters in service, sympathize with those who had tales of
woe to tell, discuss everything that had happened since her last visit, and
insist upon nursing the baby the while, and only smile good-naturedly when it
wetted the front of her frock.

Her last visit of the day was always to the end house, where,
over a cup of tea, she would become quite confidential. She and Laura's mother
were 'Miss Margaret' and 'Emma' to each other, for they had known each other from
birth, including the time when Emma was nurse to Miss Margaret's young friends
at the neighbouring rectory.

Laura, supposed to be deep in her book, but really all ears,
learnt that, surprisingly, Miss Ellison, the great Miss Ellison, had her troubles.
She had a brother, reputed 'wild' in the parish, whom her father had forbidden
the house, and much of their talk was about 'my brother Robert', or 'Master
Bobbie', and the length of time since his last letter, and whether he had gone
to Brazil, as he had said he should, or whether he was still in London. 'What I
feel, Emma, is that he is such a boy, and you know what the world is—what
perils——' Then Emma's cheerful rejoinder: 'Don't you worry yourself, Miss
Margaret. He can look after himself all right, Master Bob can.'

Sometimes Emma would venture to admire something Miss
Margaret was wearing. 'Excuse me, Miss Margaret, but that mauve muslin really
does become you'; and Miss Ellison would look pleased. She had probably few compliments,
for one of her type was not likely to be admired in those days of pink and
white dollishness, although her clear, healthy pallor, with only the faintest
flush of pink, her broad white brow, grey eyes, and dark hair waving back to
the knot at her nape were at least distinguished looking. And she could not at
that time have been more than thirty, although to Laura she seemed quite old,
and the hamlet women called her an old maid.

Such a life as hers must have been is almost unimaginable
now. Between playing the harmonium in church, teaching in Sunday school,
ordering her father's meals and overseeing the maids, she must have spent hours
doing needlework. Coarse, unattractive needlework, too, cross-over shawls and flannel
petticoats for the old women, flannel shirts and long, thick knitted stockings
for the old men, these, as well as the babies' print frocks, were all made by
her own hands. Excepting a fortnight's visit a year to relatives, the only
outing she was known to have was a weekly drive to the market town, shopping,
in her father's high, yellow-wheeled dogcart, with the fat fox-terrier, Beppo,
panting behind.

Half-way through the decade, the Rector began to feel the
weight of his seventy odd years, and a succession of curates came to share his
work and to provide new subjects of conversation for his parishioners. Several
appeared and vanished without leaving any definite impression, beyond those of
a new voice in church and an extraordinary bashfulness before the hamlet
housewives; but two or three stayed longer and became, for a time, part of the
life of the parish. There was Mr. Dallas, who was said to be 'in a decline'. A
pale, thin wraith of a man, who, in foggy weather wore a respirator, which
looked like a heavy black moustache. Laura remembered him chiefly because when
she was awarded the prize for Scripture he congratulated her—the first time she
was ever congratulated upon anything in her life. On his next visit to her home
he asked to see the prize prayerbook, and when she brought it, said: 'The
binding is calf—my favourite binding—but it is very susceptible to damp. You
must keep it in a room with a fire.' He was talking a language foreign to the
children, who knew nothing of bindings or editions, a book to them being simply
a book; but his expression and the gentle caressing way in which he turned the
pages, told Laura that he, too, was a book-lover.

After he had left came Mr. Alport; a big, fat-faced young
man, who had been a medical student. He kept a small dispensary at his lodgings
and it was his delight to doctor any one who was ailing, both advice and medicine
being gratis. As usual, supply created demand. Before he came, illness had been
rare in the hamlet; now, suddenly, nearly every one had something the matter
with them. 'My pink pills', 'my little tablets', 'my mixture', and 'my lotion'
became as common in conversation as potatoes or pig's food. People asked each
other how their So-and-So was when they met, and, barely waiting for an answer,
plunged into a description of their own symptoms.

Mr. Alport complained to the children's father that the
hamlet people were ignorant, and some of them certainly were, on the subjects
in which he was enlightened. One woman particularly. On a visit to her house he
noticed that one of her children, a tall, thin, girl of eleven or twelve was
looking rather pale. 'She is growing too fast, I expect,' he remarked. 'I must
give her a tonic'; which he did. But she was not allowed to take it. 'No, she
ain't a goin' to take that stuff,' her mother told the neighbours. 'He said she
was growin' too tall, an' it's summat to stunt her. I shan't let a child o'
mine be stunted. Oh, no!'

When he left the place and the supply of physic failed, all
the invalids forgot their ailments. But he left one lasting memorial. Before
his coming, the road round the Rise in winter had been a quagmire. 'Mud up to
the hocks, and splashes up to the neck,' as they said. Mr. Alport, after a few
weeks' experience of mud-caked boots and mud-stained trouser-ends, decided to
do something. So, perhaps in imitation of Ruskin's road-making at Oxford, he
begged cartloads of stones from the farmer and, assisted by the hamlet youths
and boys, began, on light evenings, to work with his own hands building a
raised foot-path. Laura always remembered him best breaking stones and
shovelling mud in his beautifully white shirt-sleeves and red braces, his
clerical coat and collar hung on a bush, his big, smooth face damp with
perspiration and his spectacles gleaming, as he urged on his fellow workers.