CHAPTER III.
THE HOP FOREMAN AND THE HOP DRIER.
"Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
* * * * *
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke."
—GRAY'S Elegy.
Jarge was one of the most prominent characters among my men. He was not a native of the Vale, coming from the Lynches, a hilly district to the north of Evesham. He was a sturdy and very excellent workman. He did with his might whatsoever his hand found to do, and everything he undertook was a success. The beautifully trimmed hedge in front of his cottage-garden proclaimed his method and love of order at a glance. Jarge was a wag; he was the man who, like Shakespeare's clowns, stepped on to the stage at the critical moment and saved a serious situation with a quaint or epigrammatic expression.
He was very scornful of the condition of the farm when I came, and it was he, whose reply to the late tenant that his arable land would soon be all grass, I have already quoted. In speaking to me, at almost our first interview, he could not refrain from an allusion to the foulness of the land; some peewits were circling over those neglected fields, and it was far from reassuring to be told—though he did not intend to discourage me—that "folks say, when you sees them things on the land, the farm's broke!"
From the natural history point of view he was perfectly correct, as peewits generally frequent wild and uncultivated places where the ploughman and the labourer are rarely seen.
Owing to the somewhat unconvincing fact of his wife's brother being a gamekeeper on the Marquis's estate near Jarge's native village, he had acquired, and retained through all the years of my farming, a sporting reputation; he was always the man selected for trapping any evil beast or bird that might be worrying us; and when the cherries were beginning to show ruddy complexions in the sunshine, and the starlings and blackbirds were becoming troublesome, armed with an old muzzle-loader of mine, he made incessant warfare against them, and his gun could be heard as early as five o'clock in the morning, while the shots would often come pattering down harmlessly on my greenhouse. There came a time when some thieving carrion crows were robbing my half-tame wild duck's nests of their eggs, and Jarge was, of course, detailed to tackle them. Weeks elapsed without any result; the depredations continued, and the men began to chaff him; finally Bell "put the lid on," as people say nowadays, by the following sally: "Ah, Jarge, if ever thee catches a craw 'twill be one as was hatched from an addled egg!"
For weeks before harvest Jarge patrolled my wheatfields, crowds of sparrows rising and dispersing for a time after every shot, only, I fear, to foregather again very soon on another field, perhaps half a mile distant. No doubt he sent some to my neighbours in return for those which they sent to me.
Jarge was an instance of superior descent; his surname was that of an ancient and prominent county family in former days; he carried himself with dignity and was generally respected; he possessed the power of very minute observation, and was of all others the man to find coins or other small leavings of Roman and former occupiers of my land. His eldest daughter was a charming girl, and, when Jarge became a widower, she made a most efficient mistress of his household. She showed, too, quite unmistakably her descent from distinguished ancestry. Tall, clear-complexioned, graceful, dignified, and rather serious, but with a sweet smile, she was a daughter of whom any man might have been proud. To my thinking, she was the belle of the village, and she made a very pretty picture in her sun-bonnet, among the green and golden tracery of the hop-bine in the hopping season accompanied by the smaller members of the family. At the "crib" into which the hops are picked, many bushels proved their industry, and there were no leaves or rubbish to call for rebuke at the midday and evening measurings.
I selected Jarge for foreman of the hop-picking as a most responsible and trustworthy man; it was then that his sense of humour was most conspicuous, a very important and valuable trait when 300 women and children, and the men who supplied them with hops on the poles, have to be kept cheerful and good-tempered every day and all day for three weeks or a month, sometimes under trying conditions. For though hop-picking is a fascinating occupation when the sun shines and the sky is blue, it is otherwise when the mornings are damp or the hops dripping with dew, and when heavy thunder-rains have left the ground wet and cold.
He had a cheery word for all who were working steadily, and a semi-sarcastic remark for the careless and unmethodical; a keen eye for hops wasted and trodden into the ground, or for poles of undersized hops, unwelcome to the pickers and hidden beneath those from which the hops had been picked. He acted as buffer between capital and labour, smoothing troubles over, telling me of the pickers' difficulties, and explaining my side to the pickers when the quality was poor and prices discouraging, so that the work went with a swing and with happy faces and good-humoured chaff.
I was always pleased to hear the pickers singing, for I knew then that all was well. Sometimes, after a trying day, when Jarge had been called upon to expostulate, or "to talk" more than usual, the corners of his mouth would take a downward turn, and he complained, perhaps, of gipsies or tramps whom I was obliged to employ when the crop was heavy, though they were kept in a gang apart from the villagers; but he always came up happy again next morning, the mouth corners tending upwards, and his broad and beaming smile with a radiance like the rising sun on a midsummer morning.
Jarge was a man of discrimination. When we were forced to inaugurate a School Board on account of the growing difficulty, owing to the bad times, of collecting voluntary subscriptions, all the old school managers, including my second Vicar—I served under three Vicars as church-warden—refused to join the Board. Jarge, who was much exercised in his mind as to the possibility of future bad management, came to me, and referring to a proposal to place working-men on the Board, said: "We wants men like you, sir, for members; what's the good of sending we dunderyeads there?"
Going round the farm on his daughter's wedding-day, I was surprised to find him at work; and when I asked him why he was not at the ceremony, "Well," he replied, "I don't think much of weddings—the fittel (victuals) ain't good enough; give me a jolly good fu-ner-ral!"
Jarge wore a brown velveteen coat on high-days and holidays by virtue of his sporting reputation, and looked exceedingly smart with special corduroy breeches and gaiters and a wide-awake felt hat. He was much annoyed in Birmingham, whither I had sent all the men to an agricultural show, at hearing a man say to a companion, "There's another of them Country Johnnies." When I told him what a swell he looked, he replied somewhat ruefully, "No! that's what I never could be," as though he felt that his appearance was disappointingly rustic.
Though a most industrious man, he had dreams of the enjoyment of complete leisure; he told me that if ever he possessed as much as fifty pounds he would never do another day's work as long as he lived. I answered that when that ideal was reached he would postpone his projected ease until he had made it a hundred, and so on ad infinitum; and this proved a correct forecast, for in time, by the aid of a well-managed allotment and regular wages, he saved a good bit of money. When I sold my fruit crops by auction, on the trees, for the buyers to pick, just before I gave up my land, as I should not be present to harvest the late apples and cider fruit after Michaelmas, he came forward with a bid of one hundred pounds for one of the orchards, though it was sold eventually for a higher price.
He was not well versed in finance, however, for when the owner of his cottage offered, at his request, to build a new pigsty if he would pay a rent of 5 per cent, annually on the cost—a very fair proposal—Jarge declined with scorn, being, I think, under the impression that the owner was demanding the complete sum of five pounds annually, and I found it impossible to disabuse his mind of the idea. He felt aggrieved also by the fact that, having paid rent for twenty-five or thirty years, he was no nearer ownership of his cottage than when he began. His argument was that, as he had paid more