Is, then, the last word about Bettesworth to be that he is dirty, dishonest, degraded? He may be all three (he certainly is the first) and yet have a claim to be helped now and remembered with honour.
For, as another recent incident has served to remind me, our point of view is in danger of growing too narrow. One of the kindest of cultured women, going about her work of visiting the sick, asked me how Bettesworth was doing. Then, in her amiable way, she talked of him and of his wife, and soon was speaking of the extreme dirtiness in which they had lived. As a district visitor she had once or twice come upon them at meal-times, when their food on the table caused her a physical loathing--just as once I had been nauseated myself by the sight of a kippered herring by the old man's bedside. The district visitor--being invited and finding no courteous excuse for refusal--had sat down in Bettesworth's easy-chair, not without dread of what she might bring away. Most cottages she could visit without such terrors; most people, she supposed, "managed to get a tub once a week"; but the Bettesworths.... The lady spoke laughingly. In her comely life, an experience like this is afterwards an adventure.
I smiled, and said, "They are survivals."
We both laughed; but when I added, "Yes, for some qualities," we knew (or I at least knew) that indeed that squalor of an earlier century is associated with a hardness of fibre most intimately connected with the survival of the English people.
Suppose that now in stress of circumstances, the toughness warps, turns to ill-living, suspicion, selfishness and dishonesty, in the grim determination not to "go under": is it then no longer venerable, because it has ceased to be amiable? The onlooker should give an eye to his own point of view.
_March 13, 1905._--This (Monday) morning Bettesworth came, slowly hobbling with his stick. Last week he had promised himself to be at work again to-day; but no--he is less well, and fancies he has taken fresh cold.
He looked white, weak, pathetically docile and kind, as he led the way from the kitchen door to the wood-shed, evidently desirous of a private talk.
He said he was "purty near beat, comin' over Saddler's Hill"; he had never before had such a job, having been forced to stop to get breath. It "felt like a lot o' mud in his chest; it was all slushin' and sloppin' about inside him, jest like a lot o' thick mud." But he had been worrying so: he wanted to pay me his rent. And then about his club pay--that worried him, too. He need not have worried? Ah, but he had done so, none the less; and Liz had said to him, "You better go up an' see about it, and you'll feel better when you got it off your mind"; or else he was hardly fit to be out in this cold wind. He had stayed indoors from Saturday afternoon until this morning. At tea-time, "about four o'clock yesterday," Liz had brought him a cup of tea with an egg beaten up in it, which had seemed to do him good. And she had got him half a quarte'n of whisky to hearten him up as he came away this morning. But he could not eat. "Law! they boys o' Jack's 'll eat three times what I do. I likes to see 'em. Jack says, 'What d'ye think o' that for a table?'" and indicates to Bettesworth the plentiful supply.