Read Ebook: Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer: A Record of the Last Years of Frederick Bettesworth by Sturt George

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 64 lines and 13958 words, and 2 pages

Since my last visit to him a fortnight ago, the change in him is very marked. His niece, downstairs, prepared me for it. He was very ill, she said, and so weak that now they have to hold him up to feed him. Of course he can take no solids; not even a mouthful of sponge-cake for which he had had a fancy. His feet and the lower parts of his body are swelling: the doctor says it is dropsy setting in, and reports further that his heart is "wasting away." Hearing all this--yes, and how Mrs. Cook thought he should be watched at night, for he could not last much longer--hearing this, I fancied when I got upstairs that there was a look as of death on the shrunken cheeks: they had a corpse-like colour. Possibly it was only my fancy, but it was not fancy that his flesh had fallen away more than ever.

It has been an afternoon of magnificent summer weather, not sultry, but sumptuous; with vast blue sky, a few slow-sailing clouds, a luxuriant west wind tempering the splendid heat. The thermometer in my room stands at 80? while I am writing. So Bettesworth lay just covered as to his body and legs with a counterpane, showing his bare neck, while his sleeves falling back to the elbow displayed his arms. From between the tendons the flesh has gone; and the skin lies fluted all up the forearm, all up the neck. But at the foot of the bed his feet emerging could be seen swollen and tight-skinned. His ears look withered and dry, like thin biscuit.

He did not complain much of pain. Sometimes, "if anything touches the bottom o' my feet, it runs all up my legs as if 'twas tied up in knots." Again, "what puzzles the doctor is my belly bein' like 'tis--puffed up and hard as a puddin' dish." The doctor has not mentioned dropsy, to him. Enough, perhaps, that he has told him that his heart was "wasting away." "That's a bad sign," commented Bettesworth, to me. He said he had asked the doctor, "'Is there any chance o' my gettin' better?' 'Not but a very little,' he said. 'If you do, it'll be a miracle.'" At that, Bettesworth replied, "Then I wish you'd give me something to help me away from here." "Why, where d'ye want to go to?" the doctor asked; and was answered, "Up top o' Gravel Hill" to the churchyard. "I told him that, straight to his head," said the old man.

He lay there, thinking of his death. Door and window were wide open, and a cooling air played through the room. Through the window, from my place by the bed, I could see all the sunny side of the valley in the sweltering afternoon heat; could see and feel the splendour of the summer; could watch, right down in the hollow, a man hoeing in a tiny mangold-field, and the sunshine glistening on his light-coloured shirt. Bettesworth no doubt knew that man; had worked like that himself on many July afternoons; and now he lay thinking of his approaching death. But I thought, too, of his life, and spoke of it: how from the hill-top there across the valley you could not look round upon the country in any part of the landscape but you would everywhere see places where he had worked. "Yes: for a hundred miles round," he assented.

I cannot recall all that passed; indeed, it was incoherent and mumbling, and I did not catch all. He revived that imaginary grievance against his neighbour, for drawing money from me to pay his club when he went to the infirmary. It appeared that Jack had been going into the matter, and had satisfied Bettesworth that the payments had never been really owing; so they hoped that, now I knew, I should take steps to be righted. Bettesworth seemed to find much relief in the feeling that his own character was cleared from blame. "Some masters might have give me the sack for it," he said, "when I got back to work." To this he kept reverting, as if in the hope of urging me to have justice; and then he would say, "There, I'm as glad it's all right as if anybody had give me five shillin's." To humour him I professed to be equally glad; it was not worth while to trouble him with what I knew very well to be the truth--that Mrs. Eggar was in the right, and had really done him a service.

What more? He said once, "I thinks I shall go off all in a moment. Widder Cook was here ... she was talkin' about her husband Cha'les. They'd bin tater-hoein', an' when they left off she said, 'a drop o' beer wouldn't hurt us.' 'No,' he said, 'a drop o' beer and a bit o' bread an' cheese, an' then git off to bed.' So they sent for the beer. And they hadn't bin in bed half an hour afore she woke, and he'd moved; an' she put her arm across 'n an' there he was, dead." So the widow had told Bettesworth; and now he repeated it to me--the last tale I shall ever hear from him, I fancy, and told all mumblingly with his poor old dried-up mouth. He added, almost crying, "I prays God to let me go like that." We agreed that it was a merciful way to be taken.

It still interested him to hear of the garden, and he asked how the potatoes were coming up, and listened to my account of the peas and carrots, but said he was "never much of a one" for carrots. At home I had left George Bryant lawn-mowing. Well, Bettesworth too had mown my lawn in hot weather, and smiled happily at the reminiscence. He smiled again when, recalling how I had known him now for fourteen years, I reminded him of the great piece of trenching which had been his first job for me.

So presently I came away, out on to the sunny road, thinking, "I shall not see him many more times." From just there I caught a glimpse of Leith Hill, blue with twenty intervening miles of afternoon sunlight: twenty miles of the England Bettesworth has served.

For after this he became incoherent and wandering. Dimly we made out that he "wanted to put them four poles against the veranda," apparently meaning my veranda. "What for?" his niece asked. "To keep the wall up." Then I, "We won't trouble about that to-day," as if he had been consulting me about the work, and he seemed satisfied to have my decision. But I had stayed too long; so, grasping his hand, I said "Good-bye." He asked, "Are ye goin' to the club?" "It isn't till to-morrow week," we said. "How they do keep humbuggin' about," he muttered crossly. "Yes, but they've settled it now," we assured him.

I have promised to go again to see him--to-morrow or on Sunday, because, according to his niece, he had been counting on my visit, and asking for several days "if this was Friday."

The thought came to me on my way home, that he is dying without any suspicion that anyone could think of him with admiration and reverence.

A week earlier when I parted from him, he seemed too ill to take his money--too unconscious, I mean. I offered it to his niece, standing at the foot of the bed; but she said, glancing meaningly towards him, "I think he'd like to take it, sir." So I turned to him and put the shillings into his hand, which he held up limply. "Your wages," I said.

For a moment he grasped the silver, then it dropped out on to his bare chest and slid under the bed-gown, whence I rescued it, and, finding his purse under the pillow, put his last wages away safely there.

On the Saturday I saw him, but I think he did not know me: and that was the last time. The thought of him keeps coming, wherever I go in the garden; but I put it aside for fear of spoiling truer because more spontaneous memories of him in time to come.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet