Tom Brown’s School Days and Flashman. Thomas Smart Hughes
and rolling wheelbarrows blindfolded; and the donkey-race, and the fight which arose thereout, marring the otherwise peaceful “veast;” and the frightened scurrying away of the female feast-goers, and descent of Squire Brown, summoned by the wife of one of the combatants to stop it; which he wouldn’t start to do till he had got on his top-boots. Tom is carried away by old Benjy, dog-tired and surfeited with pleasure, as the evening comes on and the dancing begins in the booths; and though Willum, and Rachel in her new ribbons, and many another good lad and lass don’t come away just yet, but have a good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being sober folk, will just stroll away up through the churchyard, and by the old yew-tree, and get a quiet dish of tea and a parley with our gossips, as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.
That’s the fair, true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy. They are much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven’t been at one these twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may be read in the pages of “Yeast” (though I never saw one so bad—thank God!).
Do you want to know why? It is because, as I said before, gentlefolk and farmers have left off joining or taking an interest in them. They don’t either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun.
Is this a good or a bad sign? I hardly know. Bad, sure enough, if it only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying overwork; or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London club-life, or so-called “society,” instead of in the old English home-duties; because farmers’ sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers’ daughters caring more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good, perhaps, if it be that the time for the old “veast” has gone by; that it is no longer the healthy, sound expression of English country holiday-making; that, in fact, we, as a nation, have got beyond it, and are in a transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some better substitute.
Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don’t let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which isn’t some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country “veast” in it; something to put in the place of the back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of men’s bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your great mechanics’ institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian young men’s societies in religious Pharisaism.
Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn’t all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education. If I could only drive this into the heads of you rising parliamentary lords, and young swells who “have your ways made for you,” as the saying is, you, who frequent palaver houses and West-end clubs, waiting always ready to strap yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John, as soon as the present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the great parliamentary-majorities’ pack-saddle, and make believe they’re guiding him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted off!
I don’t think much of you yet—I wish I could—though you do go talking and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating libraries and museums, and Heaven only knows what besides, and try to make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of the working classes. But bless your hearts, we “ain’t so green,” though lots of us of all sorts toady you enough certainly, and try to make you think so.
I’ll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss, which is only the old parliamentary-majority dodge over again, just you go, each of you (you’ve plenty of time for it, if you’ll only give up t’other line), and quietly make three or four friends—real friends—among us. You’ll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort, because such birds don’t come lightly to your lure; but found they may be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor—which you will; one out of trade; and three or four out of the working classes—tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers. There’s plenty of choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to theirs; give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your hearts; and box, and run, and row with them, when you have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride old John, you’ll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red-tape one.
Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut, I fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More’s the pity. I never came across but two of you who could value a man wholly and solely for what was in him—who thought themselves verily and indeed of the same flesh and blood as John Jones the attorney’s clerk, and Bill Smith the costermonger, and could act as if they thought so.
CHAPTER III—SUNDRY WARS AND ALLIANCES.
Poor old Benjy! The “rheumatiz” has much to answer for all through English country-sides, but it never played a scurvier trick than in laying thee by the heels, when thou wast yet in a green old age. The enemy, which had long been carrying on a sort of border warfare, and trying his strength against Benjy’s on the battlefield of his hands and legs, now, mustering all his forces, began laying siege to the citadel, and overrunning the whole country. Benjy was seized in the back and loins; and though he made strong and brave fight, it was soon clear enough that all which could be beaten of poor old Benjy would have to give in before long.
It was as much as he could do now, with the help of his big stick and frequent stops, to hobble down to the canal with Master Tom, and bait his hook for him, and sit and watch his angling, telling him quaint old country stories; and when Tom had no sport, and detecting a rat some hundred yards or so off along the bank, would rush off with Toby the turnspit terrier, his other faithful companion, in bootless pursuit, he might have tumbled in and been drowned twenty times over before Benjy could have got near him.
Cheery and unmindful of himself, as Benjy was, this loss of locomotive power bothered him greatly. He had got a new object in his old age, and was just beginning to think himself useful again in the world. He feared much, too, lest Master Tom should fall back again into the hands of Charity and the women. So he tried everything he could think of to get set up. He even went an expedition to the dwelling of one of those queer mortals, who—say what we will, and reason how we will—do cure simple people of diseases of one kind or another without the aid of physic, and so get to themselves the reputation of using charms, and inspire for themselves and their dwellings great respect, not to say fear, amongst a simple folk such as the dwellers in the Vale of White Horse. Where this power, or whatever else it may be, descends upon the shoulders of a man whose ways are not straight, he becomes a nuisance to the neighbourhood—a receiver of stolen goods, giver of love-potions, and deceiver of silly women—the avowed enemy of law and order, of justices of the peace, head-boroughs, and gamekeepers,—such a man, in fact, as was recently caught tripping, and deservedly dealt with by the Leeds justices, for seducing a girl who had come to him to get back a faithless lover, and has been convicted of bigamy since then. Sometimes, however, they are of quite a different stamp—men who pretend to nothing, and are with difficulty persuaded to exercise their occult arts in the simplest cases.
Of this latter sort was old Farmer Ives, as he was called, the “wise man” to whom Benjy resorted (taking Tom with him as usual), in the early spring of the year next after the feast described in the last chapter. Why he was called “farmer” I cannot say, unless it be that he was the owner of a cow, a pig or two, and some poultry, which he maintained on about an acre of land inclosed from the middle of a wild common, on which probably his father had squatted before lords of manors looked