Forget Me Not/1826/A Village Sketch

by Mary Russell Mitford

A VILLAGE SKETCH.

By Miss MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.

 

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I pique myself on knowing by sight and by name almost every man and boy in our parish, from eight years old to eighty. I cannot say quite so much for the women. They—the elder of them at least—are more within doors, more hidden. One does not meet them in the fields and the highways; their duties are close housekeepers, and live under cover. The girls, to be sure, are often enough in sight, true “creatures of the element,” basking in the sun, racing in the wind, rolling in the dust, dabbling in the water—hardier, dirtier, noisier, more sturdy defiers of heat and cold and wet than boys themselves. One sees them quite often enough to know them; but then the little elves alter so much at every step of their approach to womanhood, that recognition becomes difficult, if not impossible. It is not merely growing—boys grow—it is positive, perplexing, and perpetual change: a butterfly hath not undergone more transmogrifications in its progress through this life, than a village belle in her arrival at the ripe age of seventeen.

The first appearance of the little lass is something after the manner of a caterpillar, crawling and creeping upon the grass, set down to roll by some tired little nurse of an elder sister, or mother with her hands full. There it lies—a fat, boneless, rosy piece of health, aspiring to the accomplishments of walking and talking; stretching its chubby limbs; scrambling and sprawling; laughing and roaring—there it sits in all the dignity of the baby, adorned in a pink-checked frock, a blue-spotted pinafore, and a little white cap, tolerably clean, and quite whole. One is forced to ask if it be boy or girl; for these hardy country rogues are all alike, open-eyed and weather-stained, and nothing-fearing. There is no more mark of sex in the countenance than in the dress.

In the next stage, dirt-encrusted enough to pass for the chrysalis, if it were not so very unquiet, the gender remains equally uncertain. It is a fine, stout, curly-pated creature of three or four, playing and rolling about amongst grass or dust or mud all day long; shouting, jumping, screeching—the happiest compound of noise and idleness, rags and rebellion, that ever trod the earth.

Then comes a sun-burnt gipsy of six, beginning to grow tall and thin, and to find the cares of the world gathering about her; with a pitcher in one hand, a mop in the other, an old straw bonnet of ambiguous shape, half hiding her tangled hair; a tattered stuff petticoat, once green, hanging below an equally tattered cotton frock, once purple; her longing eyes fixed on a game of baseball at the corner of the green, till she reaches the cottage door, flings down the mop and the pitcher, and darts off to her comrades, quite regardless of the storm of scolding with which her mother follows her runaway steps.

So the world wags till ten. Then the little damsel gets an admission to the charity-school, and trips mincingly thither every morning, dressed in the old-fashioned blue gown and white cap, and tippet and bib and apron of that primitive institution, looking as demure as a nun, and as tidy; her thoughts fixed on button-holes and spelling-books—those ensigns of promotion—despising dirt, and baseball, and all their joys.

Then at twelve the little lass comes home again, uncapped, untippeted, unschooled; brown as a berry, wild as a colt, busy as a bee; working in the fields, digging in the garden, frying rashers, boiling potatoes, shelling beans, darning stockings, nursing children, feeding pigs—all these employments varied by occasional fits of romping and flirting and childish play, according as the nascent coquetry or the lurking love of sport happens to predominate; merry and pretty, and good with all her little faults. It would be well if a country girl could stand at thirteen. Then she is charming. But the clock of time will move forward, and at fourteen she gets a service in a neighbouring town; and her next appearance is in the perfection of the butterfly state, fluttering, glittering, inconstant, vain—the gayest and gaudiest insect that ever skimmed over a village green. And this is the true progress of a rustic beauty, the average lot of our country girls; so they spring up, flourish, change, and disappear. Some, indeed, marry and fix amongst us, and then ensues another set of changes, rather more gradual perhaps, but quite as sure, till grey hairs, wrinkles, and linsey-woolsey, wind up the picture.

All this is beside the purpose. If woman be a mutable creature, man is not. The wearers of smock-frocks, in spite of the sameness of the uniform, are almost as easily distinguished by an interested eye, as a flock of sheep by the shepherd or a pack of hounds by the huntsman; or, to come to less affronting similes, the members of the House of Commons by the Speaker, or the gentlemen of the bar by the Lord Chief Justice. There is very little change in them from early boyhood. “The child is father to the man,” in more senses than one. There is a constancy about them; they keep the same faces, however ugly; the same habits, however strange; the same fashions, however unfashionable; they are in nothing new-fangled. Tom Cope, for instance, man and boy, is and has been addicted to posies—from the first polyanthus to the last china rose, he has always a nosegay in his button-hole. George Simmons may be known a mile off by an eternal red waistcoat: Jem Tanner, summer and winter, by the smartest of all smart straw hats: and Joel Brent, from the day that he left off petticoats, has always, in every dress and every situation, looked like a study for a painter—no mistaking him. Yes; I know every man and boy of note in the parish, with one exception—one most signal exception—which “haunts and startles and waylays” me at every turn. I do not know, and I begin to fear I never shall know, Jack Hatch.

The first time I had occasion to hear of this worthy was on a most melancholy occurrence. We have lost—I do not like to talk of it, but I cannot tell my story without—we have lost a cricket-match, been beaten, and soundly too, by the men of Beech-hill, a neighbouring parish. How this accident happened I cannot very well tell; the melancholy fact is sufficient. The men of Beech-hill, famous players, in whose families cricket is an hereditary accomplishment, challenged and beat us. After our defeat, we began to comfort ourselves by endeavouring to discover how this misfortune could possibly have befallen. Every one that has ever had a cold must have experienced the great consolation that is derived from puzzling out the particular act of imprudence from which it sprang; and we, on the same principle, found our affliction somewhat mitigated by the endeavour to trace it to its source. One laid the catastrophe to the wind—a very common scape-goat in the catarrhal calamity—which had, as it were, played us booty, carrying our adversaries’ balls right, and ours wrong: another laid it to a certain catch missed by Tom Willis, by which means farmer Thackum, the pride and glory of the Beech-hillers, had two innings: a third to the aforesaid Thackum’s remarkable manner of bowling, which is circular, so to say; that is, after taking aim, he makes a sort of chassée on one side, before he delivers his ball; which pantomimic motion had a great effect on the nerves of our eleven, unused to such quadrilling. A fourth imputed our defeat to the over-civility of our umpire, George Gosseltine, a sleek, smooth, silky, soft-spoken person, who stood with his little wand under his arm, smiling through all our disasters—the very image of peace and good-humour; whilst their umpire, Bob Coxe, a roystering, roaring, bullying blade, bounced and hectored and blustered from his wicket with the voice of a twelve-pounder. The fifth assented to this opinion, with some extension; asserting, that the universal impudence of their side took advantage of the meekness and modesty of ours, [N. B.—It never occurred to our modesty that they might be the best players] which flattering persuasion appeared likely to prevail, in fault of a better, when all on a sudden the true reason of our defeat seemed to burst at once from half a dozen voices, re-echoed like a chorus by all the others—“It was entirely owing to the want of Jack Hatch! How could we think of playing without Jack Hatch?”

This was the first I heard of him. My inquiries as to this great player were received with utter astonishment. “Who is Jack Hatch!—Not know Jack Hatch!—Never hear of Jack Hatch!”—There was no end to the wonder. Not to know him, argued myself unknown. “Jack Hatch, the best cricketer in the parish, in the county, in the country!—Jack Hatch, who had got seven notches at one hit!—Jack Hatch, who had trolled and caught out a whole eleven!—Jack Hatch, who, besides these marvellous gifts in cricket, was the best bowler and the best musician in the hundred—could dance a horn-pipe and a minuet, sing a whole song-book, bark like a dog, mew like a cat, crow like a cock, and go through Punch from beginning to end!—Not know Jack Hatch!!”

Half ashamed of my non-acquaintance with this admirable Crichton of rural accomplishments, I determined to find him out as soon as possible, and I have been looking for him, more or less, ever since. The cricket-ground and the bowling-green were, of course, the first places of search; but he was always just gone, or not come, or he was there yesterday, or he is expected to-morrow—a to-morrow which, as far as I am concerned, never arrives: the stars were against me. Then I directed my attention to his other acquirements, and once followed a ballad-singer half a mile, who turned out to be a strapping woman in a man’s great-coat; and another time pierced a whole mob of urchins to get at a capital Punch—when, behold, it was the genuine man of puppets, the true squeakery, “the real Simon Pure,” and Jack was as much to seek as ever.

At last I thought that I had actually caught him, and on his own peculiar field, the cricket-ground. We abound in rustic fun and good-humour, and, of course, in nicknames. A certain senior, of fifty or thereabout, for instance, of very juvenile habits and inclinations, who plays at ball and marbles and cricket with all the boys in the parish, and joins a kind, merry, buoyant heart to an aspect somewhat rough and care-worn, has no other appellation that ever I heard but Uncle. I don’t think, if by any strange chance he were called by it, that he would know his own name. On the other hand, a little stunted pragmatical urchin—son and heir of Dick Jones—an absolute old man cut shorter—so slow and stiff, and sturdy and wordy—passes universally by the title of Grandfather—I have not the least notion that he would answer to Dick. Also a slim, grim-looking, white-headed lad, whose hair is bleached and skin bronzed by the sun, till he is as hideous as an Indian idol, goes—good lack!—by the pastoral misnomer of the Gentle Shepherd. Oh, manes of Allan Ramsay!—The Gentle Shepherd!—Another youth, regular at cricket, but never seen except then, of unknown parish and parentage, and singular uncouthness of person, dress, and demeanour, rough as a badger, ragged as a colt, and sour as verjuice, was known, far more appropriately, by the cognomen of Oddity. Him, in my secret soul, I pitched on for Jack Hatch. In the first place, as I had in the one case a man without a name, and in the other a name without a man, to have found these component parts of individuality meet in the same person; to have made the name fit the man, and the man fit the name, would have been as pretty a way of solving two enigmas at once as hath been heard of since Œdipus his day. But besides the obvious convenience and suitability of this belief, I had divers other corroborating reasons. Oddity was young; so was Jack. Oddity came up the hill from Lea-ward; so must Jack. Oddity was a capital cricketer; so was Jack. Oddity did not play in our unlucky Beech-hill match; neither did Jack. And last of all, Oddity’s name was Jack—a fact I was fortunate enough to ascertain from a pretty damsel, who walked up with him to the ground one evening, and who, on seeing him bowl out Tom Cope, could not help exclaiming in soliloquy, as she stood at few yards behind us, looking on with all her heart, “Well done, Jack!” That moment built up all my hopes; the next knocked them down. I thought I had clutched him; but, willing to make assurance doubly sure, I turned to my pretty neighbour—(Jack Hatch, too, had a sweetheart)—and said, in a tone half affirmative and half interrogatory, “That young man who plays so well is Jack Hatch?” “No, ma’am, Jack Bolton!”—and Jack Hatch remained still a sound, a name, a mockery.

Well, at last I ceased to look for him, and might possibly have forgotten my curiosity, had not every week produced some circumstance to relumine that active female passion. I seemed beset by his name and his presence, invisibly as it were. Will-o’-the-wisp is nothing to him. Puck, in that famous Midsummer Dream, was a quiet goblin compared to Jack Hatch. He haunts one in dark places. The fiddler, whose merry tunes come ringing across the orchard in a winter’s night from farmer White’s great barn, setting the whole village a-dancing, is Jack Hatch. The whistler, who trudges homeward at dusk, up Kibes-lane, outpiping the nightingale in her own month of May, is Jack Hatch. And the indefatigable learner of the bassoon, whose drone all last harvest might be heard in the twilight issuing from the sexton’s dwelling on the Little Lea, “making night hideous,” that iniquitous practiser is Jack Hatch.

The name meets me in all manner of ways. I have seen it in the newspaper for a prize of pinks, and on the back of a warrant on a charge of poaching. [N. B.—The constable had my luck, and could not find the culprit; otherwise I might have had some chance of seeing him on that occasion.] Things the most remote and discrepant issue in Jack Hatch: he caught Dame Wheeler’s squirrel; the magpie at the Rose owes to him the half dozen phrases with which he astounds and delights the passers-by; the very dog Tero—an animal of singular habits, who sojourns occasionally at half the houses in the village, making each his home till he is affronted—Tero himself, best and ugliest of finders, a mongrel, someway compounded of terrier, cur, and spaniel—Tero, most remarkable of ugly dogs, inasmuch as he constantly squints, and, commonly goes on three legs, holding up first one and then the other, out of a sort of quadrupedal economy, to ease those useful members—Tero himself is said to belong of right and origin to Jack Hatch.

Every where that name meets me. ’Twas but a few weeks ago that I heard him asked in church, and a day or two afterwards I saw the tail of the wedding procession; the little lame clerk handing the bridemaid, and a girl from the Rose, running after them with pipes, passing by our house. Nay, this very morning some one was speaking—

Dead! what dead? Jack Hatch dead? A name, a shadow, a jack-of-lantern! Can Jack Hatch die?—Hath he the property of mortality?—Can the bell toll for him? Yes; there is the coffin and the pall—all that I shall ever see of him is there. There are his comrades following in decent sorrow, and the poor pretty bride leaning on the little clerk. My search is over. Jack Hatch is dead!