Farmer Jeremy And His Ways

________________________________________________
Title:     Farmer Jeremy And His Ways
Author: L. P. Jacks [More Titles by Jacks]

Mr Jeremy's system for the regulation of human life was summed up in the maxim, "Put your back into it"; and a lifetime of practising what he preached has endowed that part, or aspect, of his person with an astonishing vitality and developed it to an enormous size. Not without reason did our yeomanry sergeant exhibit his stock joke by informing Jeremy on parade that if only his head had been set the other way he would have had the finest chest in the British army.

But the full significance of Jeremy's back was not to be perceived by one who looked upon it from the drill-sergeant's point of view. It was not only the broadest but the most expressive organ of the farmer's body, and a poet's eye was needed to interpret the meaning it conveyed. For myself, I should never have suspected that it meant anything more than great physical strength employed in a strenuous life, had not a poetical friend of mine taken the matter up and enlightened me. My friend and I were crossing a field by the footpath, and Jeremy, walking rapidly in the same direction, was a few yards ahead.

"There goes a man," I whispered, "who is worth your study. You could write a poem about him. He's one of the few remaining specimens of a type that is becoming extinct. He represents agriculture as it was before the advent of science and Radical legislation. He is the most honest and prosperous farmer in the county: a man, moreover, who has endured many sorrows and conquered them. Let us overtake him, for I should like you to see him face to face."

"Not so," said my friend. "The man's history, as you have told it, and much more beside, is written on his back. Let us remain, therefore, as we are, and study him where such men can best be studied, from the rear. His back, I perceive, especially the upper portion of it, is the principal organ of his intelligence. Observe, he is thinking with his back even now--he hitched his trousers up a moment ago. His thoughts are pleasant--you can see it in the rhythmical movement of the muscles under his coat. He has some great design on hand and is sure he can carry it through--see how his shoulders, as he swings along, seem to be tumbling forward over his chest. He has had great sorrows--the droop in the cervical vertebræ confirms it; he has conquered them--hence that forward plunge into his task. He understands his business; of course; for the back is the organ by which all business is understood. He is honest; he is temperate; he has never broken the seventh commandment. You can read his innocence in the back of his head--I wish mine were like his." And my poetical friend turned round and showed me his villainous cerebellum.

Thus enlightened, I began a closer study of the farmer's habits. I saw a new significance in an odd trick he had of suddenly swinging round on his heels at the interesting point of a conversation and delivering his remarks, and sometimes shaking his fist, with his back to the interlocutor. I say his back, but functionally considered it was not so; since at those moments the functions of the two sides of his body were interchanged, the organ of expression being the side now towards you, with every smile and frown accurately registered in the creases of the coat as they followed the movements of the muscles beneath. So, too, when Jeremy laughed. No doubt his face, while laughing, was expressive enough, but you couldn't see it, because it was turned the other way. What you did see was the farmer's coat, a tergo, twitching up and down as though pulled by a cord and then suddenly released like a Venetian blind; and this was quite enough to ensure your hearty participation in the merriment.

I also managed to take several interesting photographs from the rear; and (may the saints forgive him!) a young gentleman of my acquaintance once attempted to snapshot the hinder parts of Jeremy while in church. Unfortunately the light was bad, and the negative proved a failure. Otherwise my poetical friend, for whom I intended the photograph, would certainly have found in it material for a new poem. Be it recorded that Jeremy when engaged in devotion did not kneel, but stretched his body forward from the seat to the book-rest, presenting his back to the heavens and his face to the inner regions of the earth; and, as his body was very long and the pew very wide, the back formed a solid and substantial bridge over which you might have trundled a wheelbarrow laden with turnips. No photograph, indeed, save one of the cinematograph order, the apparatus for which was too large to lie concealed beneath the young gentleman's waistcoat, would have reproduced the creepings, ripplings, and dimplings of the farmer's coat. These gave animation to the picture; but even without them, the mere contour of the mass, thrust upwards like the back of a diving whale, was a spectacle of vigour and concentrated purpose of which my poetical friend would not have lost the significance.

Jeremy was the oldest of the Duke's tenantry, and the land he farmed, which was of high quality throughout, had been held by his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and by ancestors of yet remoter date. If there is any calling in which heredity is of importance to success it is surely the farmer's, and Jeremy was fully conscious that he "had it in the blood," and recognised the debt he owed to his fathers before him.

People are wont to criticise the old-fashioned farmer as a stiff and unadaptable person; but what struck me about Jeremy, who was old-fashioned enough, was the adaptiveness and flexibility of his mind in dealing with the ever-varying conditions the farmer has to face. He had an extraordinary instinct for doing the right thing at the right time, and handled his land as though it were a living thing, with a kind of unconscious tact which seemed to me the exact opposite to that blind and mechanical following of habit which so often, but so mistakenly, is said to be the standing fault of his class. Obstinate and incredulous as he seemed to the new teachings of veterinary or agricultural science, I yet noticed that Jeremy managed to absorb enough of these things to produce the results he desired; and though he never absorbed as much of them as the experts required, his crops were always larger and his stock healthier than those of his neighbours whose farming was strictly according to the modern card.

I have read one or two books on the nature of soils, and it is not without significance to me that the little, the very little, useful knowledge I have of these things was derived not from the books but from Mr Jeremy. There was a bit of ground in my garden where I could make nothing grow, and I hunted in vain through all the gardening books I could find for a remedy, and even went the length of consulting some of the gifted authors, two of whom were ladies. I sent them specimens of the soil for examination; they teased them with formulæ and tormented them with acids; they boiled them in retorts and pickled them in glass tubes; they sent me the names of marauding bacteria whose lodgings they had discovered in that morsel of earth: and I, following their instructions, dosed the land with atrocious chemicals, until the earth-worms sickened and the very snails forsook the tainted spot. Still nothing would grow.

Then came Mr Jeremy. He picked up a handful of the soil; gazed at it as a lapidary gazes at diamonds; smelt it; felt it tenderly with his forefinger; spat upon it; rubbed the mixture on his breeches; inspected the result, first on his breeches and then on his hand--and now my barren patch is blossoming like the garden of the Lord. The others had advised me to try I know not what--nitrates of this and phosphates of that, sulphates of the other and carbonates of something else. Mr Jeremy said, "Chuck a cart-load o' fine sand on her and then rip her up."

Mr Jeremy, I have said, was aware that his roots struck deeply into the past, and this consciousness, I believe, helped to give him that confidence in himself without which no man can successfully till the earth or battle with destiny--the two things, I believe, being at bottom much the same.

His farmhouse, so far as I could judge, was built--and built of almost imperishable stone--in the later years of the reign of Charles II., and had never been structurally modified since its erection. Some of the out-buildings were of yet earlier date. Scattered about in odd corners were not a few interesting relics of the past. For example, there was a case of coins, which had been arranged for Jeremy by the late Rector's wife, representing every reign from Charles I. to George IV., every one of which coins had been dug up on the farm. In the big courtyard there was a block of hard stone scored with grooves and notches, where the troopers in some forgotten battle were said to have sharpened their swords; on the outside wall was a row of rings and stables where the same troopers had tethered their horses. In the cellar there was a collection of large shot, which there was reason to think had been stored there at the time of the forgotten battle; and with these were a lot of iron buckles, and broken tobacco-pipes of ancient form, which had been dug up in a mound on the hillside through which Jeremy was cutting a drain. A good pint-measure of human teeth, in excellent preservation, had been discovered in the same place, and these were kept in an old tobacco-box. Connected with all this, I suppose, were the names of several of the fields on the farm: one of which was called "The Slaughters"; another, "Horses' Water"; another, "The Guns." And besides these, which reminded one of "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago," there were two other fields, the names of which were also interesting to me. One, a beautiful meadow with a southern slope, was "Abbot's Vineyard," and the big pond with the aspens beside it was "Benedict's Pool." Of these names the explanation was utterly lost; nor could I invent a theory, for the nearest religious house of pre-Reformation times was many miles away. The other field was called "Quebec," and the coppice at its upper end was "Monckton Wood."

These latter names I am able to explain. Several of Jeremy's ancestors had been to the wars, among them his great-great-grandfather Silas Jeremy, who had fought under Wolfe at the capture of Quebec, and probably under Monckton in some earlier campaign. In the house there were several mementoes of this man: the identical George II. shilling he had received on enlisting--proving, as Jeremy would often say, that his great-great-grandfather was a "sober" man; a gold watch with a beautifully executed design of the death of Wolfe engraved on the case, said to have been presented to Silas on his return from the wars by the reigning Duke; and, above all, a flint-lock musket, with bayonet attached, which Jeremy asserted his ancestor had used in the battle, but which I judged on examination to have been of French manufacture, and therefore most probably a relic picked up from the battle-field--perhaps the identical musket along whose barrel some French grenadier had taken aim at the noble heart of Wolfe--who knows?

Another memorial of this ancestor--a pretty obvious one--I can myself claim to have identified. It was an obstinate rule of the farm that the annual "harvest-home" should be held on September 13; and even if the harvest was much belated and only a portion then gathered in, still September 13 was the date, provided only that it did not fall on a Sunday. September 13, I need hardly say, is the anniversary of the battle of the Heights of Abraham. The coincidence had been entirely forgotten by the Jeremys, and was unrecorded in the traditions of our village; but not many days after I had pointed it out, the gossips having been at work in the meantime, an old man came in from a neighbouring parish and told me "as how" his father had talked with a man who knew another man who had been present at the Jeremys' harvest-home in 1760, when Silas Jeremy, who had just come back from foreign parts, and whose tomb was in the churchyard, sang a song about the taking of Quebec, which the old man's father used to sing--though he himself couldn't remember it--and declared that for all time to come the feast should be held on Quebec Day, and on no other.

This little circumstance, I may say in passing, was the beginning of my friendship with the Jeremy who forms the subject of the present story. My discovery of the coincidence gave him a most exaggerated opinion of my abilities and worth. To quote his own words, it proved me to be "a gentleman as knows what's what"--a characteristic which, so far as I am aware, has never been revealed to anybody else. And Jeremy's good opinion of me was yet further enhanced when he learnt that I had twice visited the Plains of Abraham; that I knew the place by heart; that I had climbed up the goat-path by which his ancestor had scaled the heights, and had laid my head on the spot where Wolfe met his most enviable death. He would have me into his house that very night to tell him all about it; showed me the George II. shilling and the gold watch; took down the old musket and let me handle it and put it to my shoulder and even pull the trigger; spent two hours in rapt attention while I read out Parkman's account of the battle; and finally summed up the whole campaign and its significance in one sweeping comment, "By Gum, sir, them fellers put their backs into it, and that's just what they did!"

The same held true, I should think, of Jeremy's grandfather, to judge by another relic carefully treasured in the house. This was an enormous iron crowbar, the mere lifting of which was a challenge to "put your back into it." With this weapon the Jeremy of that day had successfully defended himself against a crowd of rascals who came out to burn his ricks in '32. Some memories of that fight were still extant in the village, and a bonny fight it must have been. My informant, an eyewitness of the scene, was too nearly imbecile to stand cross-examination; but what he remembered was to the point. Aware of the impending danger, Jeremy had built his ricks that year within the defences of his courtyard, the walls of which he had rendered unscalable by various devices. It only remained, therefore, to defend the gate; and here were posted Timothy Caine with a maul, Job Henderson with a flail, an unnamed woman with a cauldron of flour to fling in the face of the enemy, and the farmer with the crowbar. These won the day; and more I cannot tell you, because my informant's language, which I could never induce him to vary, became extremely metaphorical at this point: "Master Jeremy, he give 'em pen and ink: pen and ink is what he give 'em with the crowbar, sir, that he did; there was none on 'em wanted hitting twice, no, not one; and, my eye! to see the flour a-flying! What a steam it made! I can see it now."

Agricultural experts who visited our parish, though forced to admire the excellence of Jeremy's farming, were wont to criticise him for being "too slow." Now there, I think, they were distinctly wrong. I have nothing to say against Agricultural Science: I wish there was more of it; but if it has a weakness it lies in a certain tendency to be "quick" precisely at those points where Jeremy was triumphantly "slow." His slowness was simply the instinctive timing of his action to the movements of Nature, who is also "slow" in relation to yet higher powers. You would often think that he was dawdling; but if you looked into the matter you were sure to find that just then Nature was dawdling too, and that Jeremy was beating her at a waiting game. So, too, if you watched a python creeping from branch to branch or lying coiled in a glass case you would judge it to be the slowest of beasts; but not if you saw it springing on its prey. There was much of the wisdom of the serpent in Mr Jeremy, as there must be in every man who earns his living by battle with the natural order of the world. "I wakes regularly at five o'clock," he said. "But I never gets up till a quarter past. What do I think about in that quarter of an hour? Why, I spends it in cutting out." By "cutting out" he meant the process of mentally arranging the day's work for himself and for every man on the farm. The python on the branch, I imagine, is often engaged in "cutting out." "In farming," he added, for he was giving a lesson, "you ought to cut out fresh every day, and not every week, as some farmers do--though I've knowed them as never cut out at all. And cutting out's a thing you can never learn in books and colleges. It comes by experience--and a light hand. Sometimes you must cut out rough, and sometimes you must cut out fine--mostly according to the weather and the time o' year--and always leave a bit somewhere as isn't cut out at all. And when you've done the cutting out, take a look out o' the window and tap your glass. Do it the minute you jumps out o' bed. And if there's been a change in the wind during the night, cut out again while you're pulling your breeches on and tear up what you've cut out already. And don't give no orders to anybody till you've had your breakfast--leastways a cup o' tea; it clears a man's head and lets you see if you've been making any mistakes. I've often cut out six or seven times between waking and giving the day's orders--what with the tricks of the weather and my head not being as clear as it ought to have been." And I wondered how often Napoleon had done the same thing.

Indeed, if I may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. Such slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in farming, in war, and in many other things. And of Mr Jeremy we may say that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. This gave him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being "slow." At the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in Agricultural Colleges.

I have to confess that my acquaintance with Mr Jeremy has not been without a certain demoralising effect. It has corrupted the brightness of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my youth. I will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether vanished; but, thanks to Mr Jeremy's influence, I have learned to see them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land and its uses I have entirely lost the very little effectiveness I once had. There was a time when if anyone mentioned the land I always wanted to make a speech. Now I feel--what no doubt I ought to have felt then--that I must hold my tongue. To be quite frank, my views on the land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. That a farmer owning his own land was cæteris paribus necessarily better off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth discussion. But if I had to speak on that point now, I should hesitate and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience to regard me as a fool. Instead of speaking out loud and strong for peasant proprietorship, I should be thinking all the time of the three peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood--George Corey, Charles Narroway, and Billy Hoare, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most underhand and generally despicable rascals I have ever met. Were a resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the townspeople back on to the land, I should say in support that while it is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it is yet worse to see people like Prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. I should want to tell the audience all about Prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told me to go to the devil when I begged him not to build his abominable house where it would spoil the view: and then I should want to add a few details about his personal habits which I am afraid would cause the ladies to walk out of the room. And I should wind up by saying, amid the derisive laughter of the audience, that one reason, at all events, why the real peasants go into the towns is to escape from slavery to these pinchbeck fellows who come out of the towns. I should want to quote--but I am afraid my courage would have already broken down--what Jeremy once said to me:--"The Dook--when did you ever hear of any man going into the town as worked on his estate? But as for this 'ere Prendergast, I wonder the very pigs stop in his stye."

Undoubtedly it was due to Jeremy's influence that I came to appreciate this side of the matter. He also taught me to regard the tenant farmer as superior to all other varieties of his class. I know it is wrong-headed, generalising from a particular case and all that--but I would rather be wrong-headed with Jeremy, who took a back-view of everything, than right-headed with some forward spirits who treat the land as a corpus vile for political experiments. And what logical mind could resist arguments like the following, back-views though they be?

"It takes two, sir," said Jeremy, "for to handle the land. A nobleman to own it, and a farmer to cultivate it. There's nothing that gives you confidence like having a real gentleman behind you--and the Dook's a real gentleman if ever there was one. And you want confidence in farming--and that's what these 'ere Radicals don't see. I don't want none o' their safeguards! Give me the Dook--he's safeguard enough for me! And what safeguard have you when fellers like Prendergast begin buying up the land? Look at his tenants--not a real farmer among 'em, no, and not one as can make both ends meet. These little landlords are the men they ought to shoot at, not the big 'uns. Now isn't it a wonderful thing that my family and the Dook's has kept step with one another for a matter of two hundred years? Eight Dooks in that time and eight Jeremys--one Jeremy to each Dook! But who'll ever keep step with Prendergast? Who'll ever want to? Why, I wouldn't be seen walking down the street with him, no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds. And if he was to offer me his best farm rent-free to-morrow, I'd tell him to go and boil hisself.

"No, sir," he continued, "it don't pay to own the land you farm; and don't you believe them as tells you it does. Leastways, it pays a sight better to farm under a good landlord. Them as can't make farming pay under a landlord, can't make it pay at all. Now look at me and then look at Charley Shott. Me and Charley started the same year, him with 400 acres of his own, and me with 380 acres under the Dook, rented all round at twenty-eight shillings an acre. And where are we both now after thirty years? Why, if Charley's land, and all he's made on it, and all he's put into it, were set at auction to-morrow, I could buy him up twice over! And me paying over five hundred pounds a year rent for thirty years, and him not paying a penny. How does that come about? Well, you're not a farmer, and you wouldn't understand if I told you. But I'll tell you one thing as perhaps you can understand. It hurts the land to break it up. And it hurts the land still more to sell it. Now I dare say you never heard of that before."

I confessed that I had not.

"Well, it's a fact. When you break land up it won't keep. It goes like rotten apples: first a bit goes rotten here and then a bit there; and the rottenness spreads and runs together. And as to selling, I tell you there's something in the land as knows when you're goin' to sell it, and loses heart. I've seen the same thing in 'osses. It takes the land longer to get used to a new master than it does a 'oss; and there's some land as never will.

"No, sir, I say again, if you want to make farming pay, take a farm on a big estate, one that's never been broke up and's never likely to be, one that's been in the same hands for hundreds o' years, one that's never been shaken up and messed with and slopped all over with lawyer's ink, and made sour with lawyer's lies. Never mind if the rent's a bit stiffish. Rent never bothered me."

I ventured to dissent from these opinions, for I had given lectures on Political Economy, and I knew of at least four different theories of Rent all at variance with Jeremy's--and with one another. Perhaps I should have succeeded better had I known of only one. But, knowing of four, I may have become a little confused in my attempts to confute Farmer Jeremy. Not that this made very much difference. On all questions relating to the nature of land and its uses Jeremy was a mystic, and orthodox Political Economy was as futile to his mind as it was to Mr Ruskin's. Every position I took up was immediately stormed by the rejoinder, "Ah, well, you're not a farmer, and you don't understand." I could not help remembering that I had often been overthrown in more abstruse arguments by the same sort of answer. I might, indeed, have countered by saying, "Ah, well, Mr Jeremy, you're not an economist, and you don't understand." But it occurred to me that the reply would be feeble.

"I tell you," he went on, "that good land likes to be high-rented. It sort o' keeps it in humour. Land likes to be owned by a gentleman, and keeps its heart up accordin'. Whenever the rent o' land goes down, the quality goes down too. I've noticed it again and again."

I tried to indicate that this last statement was an inversion of cause and effect, but the argument made not the faintest impression on Mr Jeremy, who merely brushed away a fly that had settled on his nose, and continued:

"I never spoke to the Dook but once. I met him one morning riding to hounds with Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha. As soon as he sees me he trots his horse up to where I was standing and holds out his hand. 'Jeremy,' says he, 'I want to shake hands with you. You're a splendid specimen of the British farmer.' 'Thank you, your Grace,' I says; 'and you're a splendid specimen of the British Dook,' for I was never afraid of speaking my mind to anyone. At that his Grace bursts out laughin', and so did Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha too. 'Let me introduce you to my two daughters,' says he. So he introduces me, and I can tell you I stood up to 'em like a man, though I did keep my hat in my hand all the time. 'Well, Jeremy,' says he, 'you've got your farm in tip-top condition'; and then he begins talking about putting up some new buildings, as me and the agent had been talking over before. 'We'll put 'em up next spring,' says his Grace; 'and remember, Jeremy, that in all that concerns the development of this farm you have me behind you.' 'I've never forgotten it, your Grace,' I says, 'and I never shall. And I'm not the only one who remembers it. The land remembers it too, your Grace,' I says. 'I hope it does, Jeremy,' says he, 'for I love it.' And I never see a young lady look prettier than Lady Agatha did when she heard her father say them words."

I had heard this story so often from Farmer Jeremy, and always with the same reference to Lady Agatha at the end, that I was familiar with every word of it. He was growing old, and I believe that in the course of the year he managed to tell the story a hundred times over. "I was coming home from market last Saturday," said he, "and a lot of other farmers was in the same compartment with me. We begins talkin' about the Dook, and I happened to tell 'em about that time when I met his Grace with Lady Sybil and Lady Agatha. There was a chap sitting in one corner as didn't belong to our lot, and as soon as he hears the Dook's name mentioned he drops his paper and begins listening. Well, I never see such a rage anywhere as that man got into when I told 'em how I kept my hat in my hand while talking to the ladies. Regular insultin' is what he was; and I can tell you I never came nearer giving a man one in the eye than I did him. I believe I'd ha' done it if there'd been room in the carriage for him to put up his hands and make a square fight on it. I don't say as he weren't a plucky chap too; for there wasn't a man in the carriage as couldn't ha' knocked his head off with the flat of his hand, if he'd had a mind to. 'Look here, you fellows,' he says, 'you're a lot of blasted idiots, that's what you are. It's because of the besotted ignorance of men like you that England has the worst land-system in the world. Slaverin' and grovellin' before a lot o' rotten Dooks--why, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! I'll bet that Dook o' yours and his two painted gals was mounted on fine horses and dressed up to the nines.' 'Of course they was,' I says, 'and so they ought to be.' 'Well,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes--and the paint?' 'Here,' I says, jumping up from my seat, 'you drop the paint, or I'll pitch you out o' that winder.' 'Well, then,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes?' 'I neither know nor care,' says I; 'so long as they was paid for, it's no business of mine or yourn who paid for 'em.' 'You paid for 'em, you fool,' says he. 'Oh, indeed,' says I. 'And now, young man, perhaps you'll allow me to give you a word of advice.' 'Fire away,' says he. 'Well,' I says, 'the next time your missus has a washin' day, you just wait till she's made the copper 'ot, and then jump into it and boil yourself!'"

The "chap" in the railway carriage was by no means the only person to whom Mr Jeremy addressed this drastic advice. It was his usual mode of clinching an argument when his instincts supported a conclusion to which his intelligence could not find the way. This method of arriving at truth was especially useful in regard to politics and theology, in both of which Mr Jeremy took a lively, or even violent, interest. Needless to say, his political aversions were of the strongest, and Mr Lloyd George was the statesman who had to bear the hottest flame of Jeremy's wrath. More than once I have seen him fling his weekly paper on the floor with the words, "I wish this 'ere Lloyd George would jump into the copper and boil hisself"; and on my remarking that I thought this a rather inhuman suggestion, he would wave his arm round the room, in a manner to indicate the entire Liberal Party, and say, "I wish the whole lot on 'em would jump into coppers and boil themselves." As to theology, I seldom dared to address a hint of my heresies to Mr Jeremy. But on my once saying to another person, in his presence, something to the effect that I did not believe in eternal damnation, he quickly crossed over to where I was sitting, and, giving me a rather ugly dig with his powerful forefinger, said, "Look here! You just jump into the copper and boil yourself." A wise stupidity was the keynote of Mr Jeremy's life.

Another expression reserved for occasions when great emphasis was needed, was "a finished specimen." A thing, in Mr Jeremy's eyes, deserved this title when its general condition was so bad that nothing worse of its kind could be conceived, and the expression accordingly was only used after the ordinary resources of descriptive language had given out. It was applied to persons as well as to things. Mr Lloyd George was, naturally, "a finished specimen": so was the German Emperor: so was Dr Crippen: so was a lady of uncertain reputation who "had taken a cottage" in the neighbourhood. A wet harvest, a badly built hayrick, a measly pig, a feeble sermon by the curate, were all "finished specimens." Once when the curate, getting gravelled for lack of matter at the end of five minutes--for he was preaching ex tempore--abruptly concluded his sermon by promising to complete the subject next week, I heard Jeremy whisper to his wife, "Well, he's a finished specimen, that he is." Nothing irritated the good man so much as an unfinished job, and the fact that a thing was unfinished was precisely what he meant to express when he called it "a finished specimen." A great deal of human language, especially philosophical language, seems to be constructed on the same principle.

Mr Jeremy was a regular church-goer. The Church in his eyes was part of the established order of Nature, on due observance of which the farmer's welfare depends, and merely extended into the next world those desirable results which sound instincts, punctuality, and "putting your back into it" produced in this. On week-days Mr Jeremy farmed the broad acres of the "Dook"; on Sundays he farmed Palestine, and occasionally drove a straight furrow clean across the back of the Universe. To both operations he applied the same methods, the same instincts, the same ideas. I confess that I have often smiled with the air of a superior person when listening to a highly trained Cathedral choir proclaiming to the strains of great music that "Moab was their washpot"; but when Mr Jeremy repeated the words in the village church I felt that he spoke the truth, and I went away with a clearer conception of Moab than I have ever gained from the works of Kuenen or Cheyne. "Moab," I reflected, "can be no other than the little field on the hillside, where Jeremy washes his sheep in the pool behind the willows." Again, I was morally certain that if Jeremy had lived in the neighbourhood of Edom he would have "cast out his shoe" upon that country, accurately aiming the missile at the head of any rascally Edomite who happened to be prowling about with a rabbit-snare in his pocket. So too when he shouted "Manasseh is mine"--he always shouted the Psalms--I was sure that Manasseh really was his, in a tenant-farmer way of speaking, and that next Thursday he would begin to rip up Manasseh with his great steam plough, and reap in due course a crop of forty bushels to the acre, paying the "Dook" a high rent for the privilege. Nor was Jeremy making any idle boast when he thundered out his further intentions, which were "to divide Sichem," "to mete out the valley of Succoth," and "to triumph" over Philistia. All this was Pragmatism of the purest water; you were sure he would keep his promise to the letter; you were glad for Sichem and Succoth, which were to be "divided" and "meted out," though perhaps a little sorry for the Philistines, who were to be "triumphed over," that a man like Jeremy should have undertaken the business; but you recognised that no better man for the job could be found anywhere than he. To be sure, Mr Jeremy, although he would have gladly boiled the whole Liberal Party in coppers, was much too tender-hearted to wish that anybody's little ones should be dashed against the stones; but I believe that in his innermost thought he launched the words against "them tarnation sparrers" and "that plague o' rats." On the whole, no one who listened to Mr Jeremy's repetition of these Psalms could doubt their entire appropriateness as a religious exercise for men such as he, or refrain from hoping that they would never be expunged from the Book of Common Prayer until the last British farmer had gone to church for the last time.

So too with the Creeds. I believed every one of them as recited by Mr Jeremy, and I found the Athanasian the most convincing of them all. The Sundays set down for the use of that Creed--and its use was never omitted in our parish--were the most serious Sundays of the year to Mr Jeremy, and the vigour of his voice and his attitude, and the fervour of his participation, made a spectacle to be remembered. I wish William James might have seen it before he wrote his Varieties of Religions Experience; it would have given him a new chapter. At the very first words Jeremy joined in like a trained sprinter starting for a race; and though the clergyman rattled through the clauses as fast as he could pronounce, or mispronounce, the syllables, the farmer headed him by a word or two from the very first, gradually increasing his lead as the race proceeded until towards the end he was a full sentence to the good. It was evident that to Jeremy's mind, and perhaps to the clergyman's also, a subtle relation existed between the truth of the Creed and the speed with which it could be rendered. Long before the end was in sight, and while Jeremy was still battling with various "incomprehensibles," the rest of the competitors had retired from sheer exhaustion; the children were munching sweets; the lads and lasses were ogling one another at the back of the church; Mrs Jeremy was staring in front of her, wondering perhaps if the careless Susan would remember that onion sauce always went with a leg of mutton on Sundays; while Lady Agatha and Lady Sybil--I grieve to record this, but my historical conscience compels me--sat down. As to those of us who remained attentive to what was going on, our confidence in Catholic Truth gradually took the form of a certainty that the farmer would come in first and the clergyman be nowhere. So it always proved. Standing in the pew behind that of Jeremy, I could see the muscles of his mighty back working up and down beneath the broadcloth of his Sunday coat; and as I looked from him to the easily winded gentleman from Pusey House who was running against him in the chancel, I could not help reflecting how ridiculous, nay, how unsportsmanlike, it was to allow two men so ill matched to compete for the same event. This, no doubt, was the first symptom that, in spite of the standing attitude, I was going to sleep. But before it could happen I was suddenly brought to my senses by the fortissimo e prestissimo of Jeremy's conclusion. "He cannot be saved," he roared out, banging his prayer-book down on the book-rest, with a defiant look around him, as though the whole Liberal Party were in church. "He cannot be saved,"--and visions of all sorts of people boiling in coppers filled the mental eye.

Jeremy, for a farmer, was the most outrageous optimist I have ever met. He never grumbled, save at politicians, and the worst weather could hardly disconcert him. "You can always turn a bit o' bad weather to good account--if you put your back into it. Yes, it's been a wet season, no doubt, but not what I should call a bad season. It's true we've made but little hay, and that not good; but the meadows isn't dried up as they was last year, and there'll be feed for the stock in the open most of the winter. I bought fifty new head o' stock last Wednesday--bought 'em cheap of a man as got frightened--and they'll be well fattened by Christmas." Serious setbacks, of course, often occurred; but Jeremy, unlike most of his kind, was not the man to talk about them. "What I believe in," he said, "is not only keeping your own heart up, but helping your neighbours to keep up theirs. I've no patience with all this 'ere grumbling and growling. Of course, a person has a lot to put up with in farming; but it doesn't do a person no good to be always thinking about that. Pleasant thoughts goes a long way in making money. And I tell you there's money to be made in farming, let folks say what they will. What farmers want is not for Parliament to help 'em, but for Parliament to leave 'em alone. That's why I can't stand this 'ere Liberal Government. Why can't they stop messing wi' things--messing wi' the land, messing wi' the landlords, messing wi' the tenants, messing wi' the farm-labourers? Why can't they leave it all alone and stick to what they understand, if there's anything they do understand, which I doubt? No, sir; I don't want their laws, good or bad. Give me the custom of the county, and a good bench o' magistrates, and a cheerful disposition, and a farmyard full o' muck, and I've got all I want to make farming pay--always provided you put your back into it."

But during the long-continued rain of last summer I could not help observing that Jeremy, in spite of his fidelity to these principles, was making an effort to keep up his heart. Not only was his hay ruined, but the finest crop of wheat he had ever raised was sprouting in the ear. There was sickness among the sheep and the pigs; and the standing crop in his great orchard was sold to a middleman for a quarter the usual price. But Jeremy made no complaint. Only, meeting the clergyman one day in the road, he said, "Parson, it's high time you put up the prayer for fine weather." Jeremy had a firm belief in the power of prayer--and especially of this one.

On the first occasion when this prayer was used in the village church I was present in my usual place behind Jeremy. As the prayer proceeded it was evident that the farmer was putting his back into it. I could see the movement of the deltoid muscles, and I watched a great crease form itself in the lower portion of his coat and gradually creep upwards until it formed a straight line from one shoulder-blade to the other. When the prayer concluded Jeremy said "Amen and Amen!" with the utmost fervour; and the crease in his coat slowly disappeared. I am afraid I was more occupied in watching this crease than in recalling the lesson that was taught to us sinners when it pleased Jehovah to "drown all the world, except eight persons."

During the next ten days the rain fell with increasing volume and fury: the ditches were in flood; the roads were watercourses, and much damage was done on Jeremy's farm. Meeting him at this time, I said in the course of conversation, perhaps foolishly, "Mr Jeremy, the prayer for fine weather seems to have done us very little good." For a moment he looked at me rather angrily, as though suspecting that some lukewarmness on my part had deprived the prayer of its due effect. Then he checked himself and seemed to reflect. "No," he said at length, "it's done us no good at all. But what else can you expect, with all them gigglin' wenches at the back of the church?"

For three miserable weeks the heavens were deaf to our entreaties, and matters began to look pretty black. A change for the better was confidently expected with the new moon; and though I have never been able to discover the origin of the superstition, nor a reason for it, I found myself as expectant as any of my neighbours--like that other great philosopher, who didn't believe in ghosts, but was desperately afraid of them. However, the new moon brought no relief to our sorry plight--and the superstition lives on in our parish, unimpaired. Ominous rumours about the end of the world spread from cottage to cottage, and our wits were busy in discovering the culprit whose misdeeds had precipitated the coming catastrophe. Most of us were persuaded that it was Tom Mellon the waggoner, a good workman but an irredeemable drunkard; and Tom, who was aware of our suspicions, became thoroughly scared. For the first time in twenty years Tom kept away from the public-house when his wages were paid, and went to bed sober but terribly depressed on Saturday night. On Monday morning, Mrs Mellon, whose face for once bore no trace of bruises, informed our cook that "her master had had a dreadful bad night. He would keep jumping out o' bed and going to the window, to look into the sky and see if anything was up." Tom had communicated his fears, when in an early stage of development, to his boon companion, Charley Stamp the ex-roadman, whose old-age pension went the way of Tom's wages and swelled the revenues of the public-house by the regular sum of five shillings per week. These two Arcadians, as they sat over their cups, concerted a plan, composed mainly of bad language, for defeating the ends of justice on the Day of Doom; and on the Saturday night previous to the one last mentioned came home together abominably intoxicated, waving their hats and roaring out as they went up the village that they were "ready" for Judgment--"with a tooral-ri-looral, and a rooral-li-ray." Subsequent events proved that neither of them was "ready." Tom's courage, as we have seen, went to pieces on hearing it definitely whispered that the universe was about to be wiped out in consequence of his bad habits. Charley's downfall was even more sudden. In the small hours of the very morning after his performance in the village street it happened that Farmer Jeremy's bull, scenting a cow in a neighbouring pasture, expressed his sentiments by emitting a loud bellow. The sound travelled to Charley's cottage, and, descending the chimney, mingled with his drunken dreams. "Get up, missis," he shouted, "get up; the trumpet's sounding!" and rushing into the garden he began to howl like a jackal. The howls woke the village, and a score of terrified souls, myself among them, convinced that "it was come at last," looked out of their windows--only to find that a lovely morning was breaking over the hills. Fine weather returned soon after; and I am sorry to say that with its coming the moral reformation which had begun so hopefully in Tom and Charley, and spread to several less hardened sinners in our village, was terminated at a stroke.

* * * * *

It must have been some four or five days before the change came in the weather that I took advantage of a bright interval in the evening to walk across the summit of the hill which shades my house from the setting sun. I pushed on into the upland until the dusk had fallen, and found myself at last in a deserted quarry--a long familiar spot, where in old days I used to meet Snarley Bob. There I sat down on the very heap of stones on which he sat as he talked to me of the stars. In due time the stars came out, and I wondered in which of them the great spirit of my old friend had found its abode. I imagined it was Capella; why I know not, unless it be that Capella was the star to which Snarley's finger often pointed when he lifted up his voice about the things on high. This has nothing to do with my story, and I mention it here only because I find myself wondering at this moment how spirits so diverse as those of Snarley Bob and Tom Mellon could have breathed the same atmosphere and drawn their sustenance from the same environment.

I lingered in the quarry pondering my memories until the great rain-clouds, creeping up from different points of the horizon, had met in the zenith and every star had disappeared. A sullen rain began to fall, and black darkness was over the hill.

I turned homewards, reflecting that it might not be easy to find my way by the sheep-tracks on so dark a night. I remembered that on the summit of the hill, some two miles from where I was, there stood an isolated barn surrounded by sheds for the shelter of cattle. From this point the way down into the village could hardly be missed, and thither accordingly I turned my steps. With some difficulty I found the barn; for the ways were wet and in some places impassable, and the night, as I have said, was very dark.

On nearing the barn I was astonished to notice a gleam of light issuing from the half-closed door. I approached, and as I did so I was yet more astonished, and a little scared, to hear the loud and lamentable tones of a human voice. I listened, and at once recognised the voice as Jeremy's, though I could not hear what he was saying nor explain to myself the preternatural solemnity of the tone. It was not a cry of pain, nor that of a man in need of human help. I drew yet nearer, and it became plain to me that Jeremy was praying.

Curiosity tempting me on, I crept up to the barn and looked in through the partly opened door. This is what I saw. Kneeling on the floor towards the further side of the barn, with a lighted stable-lantern suspended over his head, was Jeremy. His back was towards me, but I could see that he had a book in his hand. A glance was sufficient to show me that I was looking at a man in wrestle with his God. I knew the signs of Jeremy's earnestness; and they were there--intense, unmistakable. Never have I witnessed a more solemn spectacle, and, had not something held me spell-bound to the spot, I should have retreated in very shame of my intrusion.

At the moment when I first caught sight of his figure Jeremy was silent. His head was bowed on his chest, his feet were drawn close together, and his right hand, holding the book--which I saw was the Book of Common Prayer--drooped on the ground. I noted the head of a steel rat-trap protruding from the big side-pocket of his coat. I also remember how the bright nails of his boots, of which the soles were turned towards me, glittered in the light of the lantern.

Presently Jeremy raised the book, turned over the leaves--for he had lost the place--slightly readjusted his position, and in a deep and solemn voice again began to pray. And this was his prayer:

"O Almighty Lord God, who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again: we humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather, as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives, and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

It was enough. Quickly and silently as I could I slipped away into the darkness, filled with a sense of the sacrilege of my intrusion and the solemnity of the hour. I have listened in my time to many prayers of many men; I have heard the Almighty flattered, complimented, instructed in the metaphysics of his own nature, and insulted by the grovelling and insincere self-depreciation of his own creatures; I have heard him talked at, and talked about, by cowardly men-pleasers who had no more religion than a rhinoceros; and I have wondered much at the patience of heaven with all this detestable eloquence. I have heard also the short and stumbling prayers of the honest, of the Salvationist kneeling in the thoroughfare of a town full of sin, of the mother with her arms round the neck of a dying child; but none even of these have dealt so shrewd a thrust at my self-satisfaction as did the prayer of Farmer Jeremy. What strange secrets, I thought, are hidden in the human heart! Verily, the ways of man, like the ways of God, are past finding out.

Now, it so happened that I had given Jeremy a promise that I would, that very night, join him at supper and "have a chat." I would gladly have found an excuse if I could. But it was not easy to excuse oneself to Jeremy; his discernments were keen. Moreover, I half feared that he might have discovered my footsteps outside the barn; and I knew that if he had, the only wise course was to face the situation, tell the truth, and have it out. It was soon evident, however, that he had discovered nothing; and I, of course, kept my counsel.

I entered the farm kitchen and found Mrs Jeremy awaiting her husband by the fire. "Master's late in coming home," she said. "He's gone up the hill with a lantern, to set traps in the Grey Barn. He says it's full o' rats. But he ought to have come back half an hour ago."

"He'll be back soon," I answered; and a moment later I heard the ring of his boots on the stone flags outside.

Entering the room, Jeremy, without greeting me, walked across the floor and tapped the barometer on the wall. "It's rising," he said. "I thought it would by the look of the moon last night. Well, given a bit o' fine weather now, we shall not do so badly after all. The wheat's less sprouted than I thought it was; just a little down in 'the Guns,' but none at all in 'Quebec.' Please God, we shall get forty-five to the acre, up there; and all in tip-top condition."

"How are the root-crops?" I asked.

"Looking splendid; couldn't be better. You see, they're all on the high ground."

"Did you set your traps?" said Mrs Jeremy.

"I did. But there's too many rats for trappin' to do much good. We must try this 'ere new poison. That'll cook their gooses for 'em, according to what I hear."

After supper the conversation turned once more on the weather. "It's bound to mend," said Jeremy; "there's a rising glass, and the wind's gone round to the north-west since I went up the hill. Just look out o' this winder at them clouds drifting across the sky. And they're a lot higher up than they were this afternoon. And I tell you these 'ere prayers as we've been puttin' up in church are bound to do some good, though they mayn't do all the good as we want. I've noticed it again and again, both wet seasons and droughty."

"The prayer of a righteous man availeth much," said Mrs Jeremy, who, notwithstanding her mental wanderings during the Athanasian Creed, was a pious soul.

I was sorry the conversation had taken this turn, being disinclined to discuss the subject just then. But Jeremy was only too ready to take the cue.

"Yes," he said; "and the prayer of a sinner is sometimes almost as good as the prayer of a righteous man; though, mind you, I don't say it's quite as good. I'm a bit of a sinner myself; but I've had lots of answers to prayer in my life. Lots, I tell you. You see, it's this way. My belief is, that you've no business to want a thing unless you're ready to pray for it. Of course, you can't always tell what you ought to want and what you oughtn't--that's the difficulty. But my plan is to pray for everything as I wants and then leave the Lord to sort out the bad from the good. There's a Collect in church as puts it in that way. Mind you, I wouldn't pray for anything as I knowed were bad. There'd be no sense in that. And as for fine weather, all points to that being good, and your prayer stands a fair chance of being answered. Of course, it may be bad for reasons we don't know about; though I don't think it is myself. So it's right to pray for it. Pray for everything you want--that's what I says; and leave the rest to the Lord."

Jeremy would no doubt have said much more, for he was a great talker when started on his favourite themes, and this was one of them. But we were interrupted by a cry from Mrs Jeremy at the other side of the table. It was simply, "Oh dear!"

Looking up, I saw that she was leaning forward with her face buried in her hands, sobbing violently.

"Darn my gaiters!" said Jeremy, "I'm nought but a fool. I oughtn't to ha' talked about them things before my missus. I never do; but something's made me forget myself to-night. You see, it's reminded her of our trouble."

I did not understand this last remark. But I asked no question, being too much occupied in watching the infinite tenderness of the good man as he sought to comfort his wife. I draw a veil over that. "Now go to bed, there's a good girl, and think no more about it," was the end of what he had to say.

Mrs Jeremy retired, the tears standing in her eyes. She shook hands with me, but didn't speak.

Jeremy resumed his seat, lit his pipe, and began to explain. His voice trembled and almost broke down with the first sentence.

"You see," he said, waving his hand towards the fire, "it's a childless hearth.... It hasn't always been. There was one, once--fifteen years ago. He was six years of age--as bright a little nipper as ever you see. Oh yes, he said his prayers: said one too many, that he did.... O my God!... Well, it was this way. It was one Christmas Eve, and a young lady as we had for his governess had been telling the little nipper all about Father Christmas--I don't blame her; she's never got over it any more than we have, and never will--... all about Father Christmas, as I was saying; and he drinks it all in with his wide little eyes, as though it was Gospel truth. 'I'll tell Father Christmas to bring me something real nice,' he says. So just before they put him to bed that night he goes to that open fireplace, where you're sitting now, and pops his head up the chimney, and calls out, 'Father Christmas, please bring me to-night a magic lantern, a pair of roller skates, four wax candles, and a box o' them chocolates with the little nuts inside 'em, for Jesus Christ sake, Amen.' Then he goes away from the fire, and I says, 'All right, nipper, I'll bring 'em,' from behind that door, in a voice to make him believe as Father Christmas was answering. Well, he starts to go to bed; but just as he reached them stairs in the passage he runs back, and pops his little head up the chimney again. 'Father Christmas,' he says, 'don't forget the little nuts in the chocolates. I don't want none o' them pink 'uns.' And, O my God! he'd hardly spoken the words when more than half a hundredweight of blazing soot comes slathering down the chimney and falls right on the top of him just where he stood. I tell you there never was a thing seen like it since this world began! The room was filled with black smoke in a second; we were all blinded; we could neither breathe nor see. We couldn't see him, we couldn't find him; and we all stumbled up against one another; and the missus fell insensible on the floor. And him screaming with pain all the time--and I tell you I couldn't find him, though I rushed like a madman all over the room and groped everywhere, and put my hands into the very fire! Then I went too--dropped like a stone. It was all over in a minute. They pulled the rest of us out in the nick of time: but the poor little nipper was burned to death...."

Farmer Jeremy rose from his seat and went to the window. He was shaking all over; but I averted my glance, for it is a terrible thing to see a strong man in the agony of his soul, and the eyes cannot bear it long. "The clouds are breaking," he said; "and, please God, I'll cut 'the Slaughters' to-morrow. But there's one harvest as will never be reaped: and there's one cloud that will never break. Not till the Resurrection Morn. Ah me!"

* * * * *

On the lovely afternoon of an autumn Sunday, about a fortnight after these things, I met Jeremy in the fields, walking the round with his terrier dog.

"Grand weather for farmers," I cried.

"Grand it is, sir," he answered, "and let us be thankful for it."

"Yes," I said; "it has been long enough in coming, and is all the more welcome now it has come."

I felt that the words struck the wrong note; or rather they struck none at all, where a note of music was needed. But I knew not what else to say. Jeremy with all his reserve was less timid and more affluent than I.

"Have you never thought, sir," he said, drawing near to me, "what brought the fine weather?"

I hesitated and was silent.

"Then I'll tell you," said he. "The power o' prayer."

That very day I had been reading a book on Primitive Religion; and as I parted from Jeremy a question flashed through my mind. "May it not be," I asked myself, "that Primitive Religion is the only religion that has ever existed, or will exist, in the world?"

[The end]
L. P. Jacks's short story: Farmer Jeremy And His Ways

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN