Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 840
“Let me remind you that you are getting far away from the problems of agriculture,” the Advanced Thinker once more took up his parable. “I stand for the future; therefore I surely before all others have the right here to be heard.”
The terrace by this time was entirely filled by disputants. They obscured the view for my friend whose dream had caused them to arise. He was surrounded and overwhelmed by their forms and by their voices. But giving way, as all crowds will do, to the disputant who made the most confident claim to a hearing, they 197 fell silent and paid attention to the Advanced Thinker. He lay back in his arm-chair, facing that of my friend who had dreamed him; he cleared his throat and, with the level intonation of one used to making long speeches and thinking long thoughts, he began, after having swallowed a jujube —
“The matter divides itself into several heads. In the first place it is open to doubt whether all reasons for the existence of the field labourer have not vanished with the advance of the applied sciences. We are now — or we are upon the point of being — able to reconstruct out of common clay, coal-tar products, and natural mineral oils, all the food-stuffs that are necessary for human sustenance. Let me, however, concede for the sake of argument that it would be possible to cultivate one staple commodity — say wheat — at a cheaper rate than its constituents could be evolved from coal-tar and reconstructed so as to be digestible and nutritive. Then we have constructed engines that, with the expenditure of the care of merely one man, will be able to scratch up, rake, furrow, roll, and cover practically unlimited acreages of land in the shortest of spaces of time.”
“How about my heavy clays?” cried a Norfolk farmer from the background.
“How about my light sands?” cried another. “I’ve had to give up steam ploughs and return to horses!”
“Details — details,” said the Advanced Thinker 198 unconcernedly. “I think I have proved to my hearers that even for purposes of cultivation the need for men upon the land has vanished.”
“You need a man with a d — d good head-piece to drive one of my engines,” said a steam-plough proprietor.
“Precisely — precisely,” the Advanced Thinker retorted. “What we need is not men with a knowledge of soils, but skilful mechanics. Any soil, light or heavy, can be handled and clean ploughed by the right type of engine. But let me resume my train of thought. It seems to me, as to many of my friends who have spoken or not spoken, that the ultimate and the real function of the land is to become one vast pleasure park. We shall be rid, then, of the poor, warped, gnarled, unintelligent farm labourers, farmers, small holders, and the rest. We shall be rid once for all of the steam, the mire, and the grime of Mother Earth. We shall be able to breed a clean, straight-backed race of men, fit to meet and to solve the real problems that lie before humanity.”
Loud cries of derision, of rage, and of mockery came from all the idealists of the now great assembly. Our friend the dreamer caught fragments of phrases: “Return to the earth,”
“Mother Nature,”
“The good, free air,”
“The health-giving, brown soil,”
“The truth of the broad heavens,” and “The dignity of labour.”
But the tumult stilled as dream tumults will still themselves, and the Advanced Thinker proceeded —
“Oh, well, since you will have mud-grubbers, let me sketch a really modern rural Utopia....”
There were to be in the centre of this town or village great light and airy schools — these before all. Then there should be a library, communal cook and bake-houses, a vast communal eating-room where all meals should be taken in common, communal thrashing-barns and cold-storage barns, communal engine-sheds, communal theatres, concert - rooms, debating halls, and a place of free worship, communal barracks for communal domestic servants who should at convenient hours make the beds, dust, sweep, or decorate the individual cottages. These, small, white, beautiful in design, and not too close together, should cluster in a ring round one of the communal buildings, and from each cluster, radiating as the spokes of a wheel, there should run over the plain, cinder tracks along which the men should cycle to their holdings.... Here at least men might live the lives of men and find food for the mind along with a measure of health-giving labour....
Stirred by this attractive vision of a white-walled township studded with a ring of trees, the spires of its communal buildings rising like tall poplars above the red roofs, the white walls, and the green plain like a great shallow bowl beneath a plain blue sky dotted with balloon-like pink and woolly clouds, itching to be nearer the realisation of this smiling and radiant vision, impatient for some one who should take the first step towards it, my dreaming friend moved in his cane arm - chair and uttered his unfailing formula —
“Something must be done!”
And immediately the whole assembly began to cry out in a babel of tongues; a vast multitude of white faces, each with intent eyes, and opened, shouting mouths; a weird and tremendous crowd, like that in the gigantic imaginings of a great mediæval painter of a Last Judgment; thousands and thousands and millions and millions of voices, in all the tongues of the world, in all imaginable accents, with all the possible tones of assurance, began to cry out panaceas, all the first steps towards the solution of this problem. And each man of all the millions (the thing was apparent to the dream consciousness of my friend) — each man had a panacea that differed from that of his neighbour.
A cold chill, a weariness of nightmare, oppressed the dreamer, he half started from his chair, and found himself lying alone upon his own veranda in his own cane lounge. A suddenly arisen great gust of wind was rushing through the dark forms of the pines and poplars across the way, and against the full white face of the moon the form of a bat silhouetted itselt for a minute.
“Certainly something must be done,” my friend said to himself.
The wind fell, and the poplars reached, tall, motionless, and black, towards the heavens.
L’ENVOI. “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES...”
OUT on the field before the house, in serrated rows that dwindle from the height of clothes-presses to the small clusters of jam jars showing above the tufts of already wintering grass, there lie all the paraphernalia with which a man throughout his life has attempted to stave off the bare terror of the four walls of his rooms. There is the old arm-chair in which he throned it for so long as the central figure of the small cluster of beings that went with him to the edge of the last descent that he should ever make. There, a mere bundle of brown pieces of wood, of sacking, of cordage and of screws, is the bed on which he passed so many nights; it confronts at last the grey sky from which during so many hours of darkness he hid; and ludicrous, pathetic or merely sordid, confronted as they are by the eternal truths of wind, weather, light and earth, from which they too hid so long, lie all the essential verities of a man’s life.
Near the field-gate stands the thin blue figure of the policeman, a symbol of the law, with the pale light glinting on his silvered buttons; near him, fat, bearded and assured, stands the auctioneer, a symbol of commerce that continues, though all men die; plastered upon the gate-post, its bold black letters odd and pathetically trail, contrasted as they are with the aged spines of the high-road hedges, there shines the white placard whose first words read —
“By order of the Trustees of So-and-so, deceased.” Far down in the meadow, huddled together in dull amazement,’is the flock of sheep, the rightful tenantry of this October grass; anil entering the field, in knots or singly, desultorily, shyly, as sheep themselves enter an unaccustomed pasture, there come the buyers, who, gradually growing emboldened, saunter down the rows of “ things”; linger the worn curtains that once shut out the light; sit warily in chairs that, meant for hard floors, sink ominously into the damp turf; or turn round to the skies pictures of men in hunting coats who bear golden-headed children upon their shoulders.
A small nimble pony, frightened by an arriving motorcar, breaks away from the knot of traps tethered at the further gate-way. With its little dog-curt behind it, it runs round and round in the field as if it were performing some circus feat upon the soft tan of the turf. Men with their knees bent and their hands stretched out and downwards, narrow the circle around it. When at length it stops and allows itself to be caught, the occupants of the motor-car enter the field as if they were the masquers of Henry VIII. distinguished strangers from another planet. The auctioneer, having drunk from a case bottle and brushed some crumbs from his grey heard, mounts a kitchen chair; the crowd, sure now of a legitimate centre, close round him with faces already on the grin; an old saucepan is held above the heads of the crowd. The auctioneer says —
“Now here’s a very valuable....”
You do not hear the last word because already the laugh goes up. The sale has begun.
And, wandering among the least considered trilles of how many poor friends of mine (they will never be poor any more), I have often thought that that first laugh of the auction crowd marks the last stage in the dissolution of So-and-so. Never before, however poor or however despised he were, could his meanest household utensil be really laughed at. If it were only an old kettle, its holes stopped up with soap, so long as its owner kept it in use it would have about it some of the sanctity of the house itself, and some of the sanctity of a tool. And we never laugh at tools; the more old, the more battered, the more makeshift they may be, the more we admire its owner, since with them he performs feats of increasing difficulty. Nor, for the same reason perhaps, do we ever laugh at a poverty-stricken house, since that too is an implement, and, gazing at broken roofs, broken doors, gaping walls or apertured windows, we must needs wonder how a man, much such a one as 207 we are, can in it and by its aid perform that most desperate feat of all, the feat of living.
As long as poor So-and-so kept things going with all these poor makeshifts, as long as the small bundle of odd bed-wrenches, broken chisels, disused clock keys and rusty pony-clippers formed a portion of his wordly goods that now forms “Lot 7” — as long as he lay still in an upper room, as long even as he retained a sort of corporate identity by means of the “Trustees of So-and-so” who have ordered this sale, for so long these poor things were still sharers of that reverence that we must pay to a man however despised. I remember being present when some farm-hands, from beneath a bed of rotting straw in an out-house corner, raked out old pipes, old boxes of matches, mouldy crusts of bread, mouldy rinds of gnawed cheese, and a battered tobacco-box. They were the horde of the village idiot who on that bed in that barn corner had six months before yielded up his soul to the clutches of a rigid frost. He had been dead six months, but in the face of these scraps of his we felt him suddenly to rise once more; he had been the last man to touch them; he had so ordered their lying there. And until they were kicked pell-mell out into the mixen before the door, his presence seemed still to stand in the corner of the barn. We called him “Poor Old Ben....,” remembered him, and to that extent paid to him the tribute that each man pays to the majesty of humanity in its units.
But the auctioneer is the ironist speaking from 208 beneath the august shadow of the eternal passing of life. He has taken the place of the gravediggers of Hamlet, and since a man’s skull is so much less than his snuff-box a part of the man that we know, the auctioneer’s broad, coarse or bitterly jocular comments are more winged than were ever those of the digger of graves. For the grave is inevitable and we accept it without protest; but no man’s Chippendale bureau set out on the grass need say inevitably, “To this favour we must all come.” Every man must die; but it seems always a little pitiful that any man should die so unbefriended that he has no one who will treasure up for his dead sake these most intimate of his associates, these his implicitly faithful vassals.
Yet in the end to these favours almost everything that is lasting must come. Heirlooms, descending as it were stage by stage in a funnel-shaped progress, must almost inevitably reach an outlet which is this of the auction. To the oldest of families there always comes a last member, and to that last member always his trustees. It is that at the best, since it is always good to be dead; at the worst the trustees may be those “In Bankruptcy.” Then selling is at its bitterest; and each of the intermediate kinds of sellings means change, and every change is a thing that humanity must a little fear. Thus in that open field, beneath that grey sky, round the public jester upon his kitchen chair, the laughter of each man and woman rings a thought falsely. For who among us can be quite certain that it will not be his turn next to die 209 untreasured, to fail miserably, or to leave that country-side?
Countrymen rise and fall; the auctioneer is always at the flood of his eloquence. He is the one man of the rural world who is assured of prosperity, the one man certain to flourish all the more because of widespread ruin. It is always a little depressing to me to open my country paper about Michaelmas. There, in place of the familiar and uninteresting local notes of the central pages, I find, year after year, four immense sheets, an area almost as large as the mainsail of a yacht, given up to the announcements in small, broken print of forthcoming sales by auction. Glimpses of how many farms will not flash before one’s eyes if one have really the heart to go through all those little poignant notices of failure, of decay, and of change. Here is Ruffian’s Hill farm, with its great stone kitchen that one remembers best lit by one tiny candle flame; here is Penny Farthing farm with the great barns. Well, Higgins has gone; old Hooker has failed. Here is the Brook farm that stood so high, with the two twisted poplars, like plumes, on each side of it against the sky. Here are Coldharbour and the Court Lodge that Files ran. Well, rum-shrub is said to have caused that display of 210 sheep, so many drawing-room chairs, and so much live and dead farming stock beneath the inclement sky. Here too is Dog’s Hill. Mrs. Hackinge has had to sell. We all knew she would ever since her husband hanged himself in the cart-lodge because hops fell below 210 thirty shillings. Hackinge was always a wild-cat man, going in for poultry and apple farming, and selling feathers for mattresses and the Lord knows what.
Thus most of us shiver a little when we meet the auctioneer in his dog-cart briskly quartering the roads like a game-dog. It is as if on the hard road the shoes of his horse rapped out, “Change, change, change-ty-change”; it is as if his bright eyes saw the smut on how many fair fields of wheat, the foot-rot in how many flocks. And “change, change, change,” is the note of all country-sides. Yet it is astonishing how little the change is in evidence once the changes are made. You put a corrugated iron roof in place of the thatch on the great barn, and in two years’ time you have forgotten that the covering was ever dun-coloured and soft. You put James Harper into Penny Farthing in place of old Hooker, and, ir you do not forget old Hooker, you wonder a little, when you think how well James Harper, who started as a weazened and niggardly innovator, has been bronzed, beaten and worried by weather till he fits into his place for all the world as well as old Hooker ever did. And one forgets, somehow, that old Hooker died before the telegraph office was opened at the Corner. One forgets even that he was there before the new tenants came to the Hall, and it startles one to hear them say that they do not even remember old Hooker’s mother, who trotted about on two sticks for a year-and-a-half after old Hooker died. These 211 people at the Hall do not even remember Miss Wilton, the post-mistress, though, when one comes to think of it, it does not seem possible that the hills can look quite the same without her to tear a hole in one’s brown-paper parcels so that she might see what one’s friends sent for Christmas.
Yet in spite of all these impossibilities there is the place, our heart of the country, very much the same. It is even more the same, since to all the original new impressions that it once made upon us there is superadded this cloud of little memories, these films of dust, these makings of histories. For in a sense it is just the deaths that go to make up the restfulnesses, the old associations, the glamours of each heart of the country. At each change we cry out, each death we lament, each bankrupt we shake by the hand and assure him that after his failure the place can never seem the same. Yet each of these changes hallows for us some spot; each of them renders some corner of a corner more sacred, more intimately our own by right of memories. We do not, as it were, discover the Fountain of Youth that we set out to seek; but we do find out, little by little, the secret of growing old mellowly and with reverence. We discover suddenly that we are one of the few who can remember when Penny Farthing tithe-barn was thatched, who can remember an old fellow called Hooker. He used to break in a team of black oxen to the plough every year, and, wild as you may think the idea, it paid him very well. If he had call to use them for any press of plough-work, there they were; if not, he fattened them off just like any other bullock, and nothing lost save the small pains he had been at. And, sitting by the fire one winter night when it is too wild to get out and too wild for a friend to come in, one will surprise oneself by trying to remember how the place looked when first, by birth or by imagination, we opened our eyes upon it. And we shall surprise ourselves by saying: “Why, it isn’t the same place at all.” For so gradually will the change have come that we shall never have heeded it in the large; the spirit of the place will seem to remain utterly the same. It is that sort of feeling that prompted the direction that I once received in a strange countryside —
“You go down the lane till you come to the place where Farmer Banks’s old barn used to stand when he kept six cows in it.”
