A CENTURY OLD.
THE South-East Wind brought up the snow, and wrapped the common in a dazzling shroud, and then the mild sea-damp that is never long absent from sea-bound Somerset rolled up too and dulled the glitter of the frozen snow with a faint clinging mist, chilly and tremulous, and as silent as death. All the furze was hidden under a shapeless fall of snow, but the two ancient barrows on the crest of the common stood up dark above the prevailing whiteness because the wind had blown the snow off their exposed tops, although it lay drifted deep on the windward side below. Dense clumps of evergreen in the hedges skirting the open, holly and yew and great ivy-bushes, rose in sullen masses above the soft melancholy whiteness round like a sturdy protest against the illusion of death that was hiding all the world. You could not see more than two hundred yards ahead through the mist, though it was light with a kind of luminous deadness. It was Mrs. Patch's hundredth birthday on that misty morning, and although, after ninety-nine birthdays, it could hardly be supposed that another one would make much difference, especially as birthdays do not arrive suddenly, still, the completion of a century of such anniversaries seemed to require a visit of ceremony.
There were other creatures that had not yet kept an anniversary of their birthdays on the common on that misty morning. A few cottagers keep one or two sheep who graze • by the common, and there in the snow were some woolly ambs standing up on tottering black legs, and gazing at the passer-by in the mist with the amazed eyes of the newly born. The severity of the elements seems kind to these tender creatures, who suffer less from snow than rain, and the panting ewe-mother in the lee of the hedge gives all they need of shelter and warmth and food. And there were other things shyer than the lambs, who have an inherited tolerance of human beings, fascinating strange things that hid and nestled and avoided human inquisitiveness as if they had belonged to another planet. Beneath the furze and bushes there was a mysterious rustling of unseen life under frozen boughs: tiny hidden feet pattering on dead leaves as some soft feathery thing edged further away from the passing stranger, rustling things, stirring invisible somewhere, everywhere a bewitching sense of hidden presences, soft furred or feathered creatures unseen watching out of the speechless world that borders ours with anxious bright eyes. The path winds down the common and the steep street, and up again to the sheltered row of cottages where Mrs. Patch lives, quite out of the domain of these sweet wild creatures, whose happy lives are crowded into a span beside which her long hundred years must seem nearly an eternity.
In view of the fact that a hundred years of life must deepen a hundredfold one's experience of life's limitations, it seems an indecorum, in the face of Nature, for Mrs. Patch to be so proud of her age. But then that passing of four generations, which has so greatly changed the face of the world and the history of nations, has done little more to Mrs. Patch than to multiply a hundredfold the wrinkles in her withered old face. What are wars and Empires, the wreck of kingdoms and the commerce of nations, to Mrs. Patch on the edge of a Somerset common! "When I wer' a maid," says she, "feyther a did hey' eight shillin' weekly an' nine o' we to feed, an' tea wer' eight shillin' a pound. 'Tis less nor that now, look." And she can tell you what a " long " family old Parson had; and when " Passon's maid" visits her, Mrs. Patch, blinking at her with suspicious eyes, like an old animal who dreads disturbance, until she realises her visitor, collects her poor old faculties for an appropriate remark. " Aw tbeer," says she, "I do zay my prayers reglar, I do, and thank the Lard every marnin' vur bringin' I to another day"; and at this point her attention generally wanders to her visitor's basket, whence if the leg of a duck or such small dainty should be forthcoming, Mrs. Patch will become more expansive. She has a letter which came "cane from Australy, a girt ways off, they do tell I," for she has kindred there ; but she is more interested in the different Patches departed and buried in W— Churchyard, because that presents a more definite idea to her mind. And then she will tell you that she was " drafted " last year, and show you her photograph with a childish pleasure in the likeness.
If we were all wise in proportion to our experience and virtuous in proportion to our blessings, how many moralists would be out of work. Now John Andrews says Mrs. Patch is worldly, and if you dared you would laugh to hear such a ponderous word applied to such a little, helpless, withered old woman, a century old. Only nobody dares contradict John, because he is conscience, oracle, and director to the village, and knows everybody's business much better than they do themselves. John is still a young man, but he had rheumatic fever very badly some years ago, and ever since he has been slowly wasting inch by inch. His limbs are helpless and terribly twisted, and his faculties are going by degrees, for he has lately become blind, which is a terrible deprivation to poor John, whose intellect is his idol. Now, with "Wisdom at one entrance quite shut out," he has to depend on charity for his reading, because Mary, his mother, is up scholar, and can just stumble through a newspaper with John's help. But though John's thread of life is so pitifully frail, he has a mounting spirit that refuses to be held within four walla like poor old Mrs. Patch. In the days of his youth he aspired to be a Labour Member, and the habit of reforma- tion seems to become stronger as his body gets weaker. Nothing, not even local custom and the parson, is safe from John's criticism. Whatever you do or think, John will always tell you how it can be done and thought better. And in addition to his habit of reform, he has another habit of omniscience, against which argument is unavailing, because if facts do not happen to agree with his ideas, he adopts the simple and effectual process of not believing them. John has a solution to every problem, and is always ready to show the village the right way to walk in. He is always suffering, and very seldom complains. He lies in the dark and thinks, because that is the only escape from his prison. One or two visitors come regularly and read to him, and he always wants books of a solid order, that give him "something
to feed on," as he says. At present he is absorbed in a work on early Christianity, of a harrowing description, very dull and very learned ; but John likes it the better for the hard words that stimulate his curiosity, and the utmost discretion must be exercised in skipping passages of peculiar gruesome- ness, because John is very quick to resent the remotest sug- gestion that anything is beyond him. And like many self- taught people, he is rather intolerant of those who slide along the easy and delusive ways of ignorance. He is more ready with blame than praise, and never spares the lash ; but all the same, the village regards him with a chastened admiration because be is a sort of vicarious conscience to it. John has no opinion of Mrs. Patch. "Her thoughts," says he, "is not fixed as where they should. She don't think where she's going to,"—which bald statement of fact comes with a shock upon those accustomed to hear certain elementary truths expressed with more reserve. But the directness of speech and thought natural to the poor appeals to their own class as more polished phrasing never could. Once when a great, strong, young man, with a clumsy attempt at sym- pathy, compared his own big, healthy frame with John's wasted body—" Young man," said John, rolling sightless eyes at him, "are you prepared for eternity P" John knows quite well that, however small the house of life may be, it is always possible to look out of the window, because his mother, who lives with him and nurses him unceasingly, belongs to the order of those who possess all things when they have nothing.
Mary Andrews is a great sufferer, though most uncom- plaining, and the one dread of the two poor things is that Mary, upon whom John is absolutely dependent, should be taken first. But though Mary herself is so frail, her cottage is as neat as a new acorn-cup, and she is always so busy with her house and her invalid that she has only time for the briefest excursion, in clogs, to a sick neighbour's or the village shop. Constant anxiety and pain and weariness have seamed her face with long sad lines; but they have also made it beautiful, and she is the very model of Saint Anne. For all her care, Mary is never out of humour, but has always the same grave, cheerful tranquillity ; and though she reveres John as the wisest and best of men, yet she has been known to rebuke him when be became more than usually censorious.
"Jan, Jan, thee should'st not say 'en" ; and though John protested "But 'tis true, mother," yet lie dropped the subject.
Mary says : "Us do make our own joys, I reckon," and some people think that the uncomfortable parts of life are exactly those which make it best worth living. However that may be, Mrs. Patch's experience of the "aching joys" of life cannot be very large, or she would never have been so unconscionable as to go on lasting a hundred years in the face of it. But perhaps Mary is right about the joys we make ourselves. For though she and John are to all appearance much less comfortable than Mrs. Patch, they do not think her lot enviable. The grievousness of poverty is when it cramps growth, and there are certain ways of growth equally accessible to poor and rich,—labour and anxiety for children and kindred, the beloved and the dependent. Mrs. Patch missed that way, because she had no children ; and though, like every one else in W—, where husbands and wives some- tunes are related fourfold, she has countless kinsfolk, she has not chosen the voluntary burden of other people's troubles as some generous souls in every rank of life seem driven to do. And so her small devotions to her poor little comforts call down John's censures on her head. John does not consider that being a hundred years old is any excuse, because
"The 'soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time bath made "; and in view of the fact 'that neither he nor Mary has chosen to be imprisoned within the narrowness entailed by poverty of all things, he may be excused for reflecting that a hundred chinks have let very little light into the particular dark cottage which Mrs. Patch's soul inhabits. The truth is that most of us choose a prison and stop inside it of our own accord. The cell may be wide or narrow according to conditions, but is nevertheless a prison. It seems as if there were a deep-rooted instinct that drives civilised man to shut himself up close inside any protection that can part him from the greater elements outside. So that the creatures which are born destitute, as we reckon destitution, have a wider
inheritance not of their own choosing. Those who are very poor, or very wise, may find out the enchanted place where poverty is a deed of possession, admitting the owner to a share in the wide inheritance of the wild things born on the common to short lives and poverty. The lambs that gaze out on the snowbound heath with the amazed eyes of things newly past. the threshold of a world of unimagined limitations are not in much poorer case than Mrs. Patch shut up inside the shell of a hundred years' hardening. For although Mrs. Patch does not share the intellectual privileges that poor John Andrewa values so highly, there are still other possessions to which the poorest have a right, in the universal brotherhood of simple.. creatures, furred, feathered, or human. "There's night 1914.7 day, brother, both sweet things; there's sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There's likewise a wind on the heath." But while the wind blows on the heath those who have houses stay inside them.
There is (or was) a brown donkey who draws up water from the well at Carisbrooke by trotting an unending course inside a great wheel. And whether buckets go up or down, and whether Kings or trippers stand by to watch, the meek involuntary moralist goes on trotting inside his enclosing wheel, never getting any further on and never looking away from his own patient brown legs. The brown donkey did not choose his wheel ; but most of his human prototypes from sheer force, of habit endure a voluntary servitude inside a different wheel which turns perpetually one way and dulls the senses that might have been listening to the wind on the heath. Some- times there are a few desperate struggles to get away from the ceaseless turning, but the fatal circle closes in, until. another wheel is broken at the cistern and we turn no more. .
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