Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗

class="calibre1">about their discourses, as they raised their voices in rustic eloquence

and testified to the cleansing power of ‘the Blood’, forgetting

themselves and their own imperfections of speech in their ardour.

 

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, crossover 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