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A Rolling Stone, Vol. I

Chapter VIII

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Chapter VIII.

‘Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard,
Heap high the golden corn;
No richer gift has autumn poured
From out her lavish horn.’

Having worked and worried to get his wheat reaped, Langridge was going through the same wear and tear of both mind and body with a view to getting it thrashed. A Mr. Palmer was the man who had engaged to do this work. Palmer dragged a steam engine and thrashing machinery about the country, thrashing out the crops he not unfrequently had put in by contract some months before. He was supposed to be making money. Langridge always declared that he absorbed all the profits of his farming. Palmer was in great request at two seasons of the year—seedtime and harvest—and often was not to be had for love or money, owing to a press of engagements. Farmers would wait on him at untimely hours, beseeching him to put their crops into a marketable condition without delay. He and one or two others of the same trade were accused of engaging themselves to six or seven farmers at a time, and making small affairs wait, till, in their despair, page 94 the baffled agriculturists were almost induced to revert to the primitive threshing-floor of the ancients.

To speak plain truth, Palmer was an honest man, a little embarrassed by that desirable thing, a good business. Like the rest of the world, however, he could not escape calumny. Langridge had collected every wheat-ear that conveniently could be collected, had filled an array of waterbutts for the requirements of the engine, had ordered a ten-gallon cask of beer for the somewhat similar requirements of the men, and then, Palmer not appearing, as according to promise he ought, sat down to abuse him.

But one afternoon a black mass loomed in the distance, which Langridge, by the help of Stephen's race-glass, identified as the engine. It had cracked two bridges on the road, and seriously injured the railing of a third. By the unskilful steering of the man in charge it now, like Samson, bore away Langridge's new gates, and strewed the road with their fragments.

‘Where's your master?’ shouted Langridge, after gloomily surveying the wreck.

‘Couldn't come to-day, sir. Of course he'll see everything put right again.’

‘I should think so! Strange thing: so soon as I get new gates some one is sure to smash them. A nice time I've been waiting for you. Your master has thrown me away nearly a shilling a bushel. I wonder his conscience allows him to take more work than he can do in a reasonable time.’

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‘My word, sir,’ expostulated the man, ‘how can we help being up to the eyes in work? There's every farmer in the country at Mr. Palmer wanting his wheat thrashed, and every one of the lot wants his done first, and those who have to wait are fit to turn and rend us. We can't do it all at once, and we can't work any faster than we do.’

‘You shouldn't make promises then. I'd have had some one else long since if I'd known. I was nearly sending for Jefferies.’

‘Jefferies!’ said the engine-driver (by name Smithers) with ineffable contempt. ‘He'd blow away half your wheat into the chaff, and leave most of the other half in the straw. His rattletrap old machine won't thrash; it's done for.’

‘Oh, of course, you're the pick of the universe. Well, what now?’

‘I'm afraid, sir,’ said Smithers, halting with his cavalcade before a second gateway, narrower than the first, ‘that we can't get through here unless you'll allow us to pull up a panel of fencing.’

‘I shall have to pull up a chain of fencing next to accommodate you,’ said Langridge. ‘Why, you got through last year; you don't mean to say your engine has grown?’

‘We broke both the posts to splinters,’ the engine-driver reminded him.

‘Oh, well, have it up then,’ said Langridge. ‘Pull up half a dozen panels, only get through some way.’

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It took some time to see the long train safely through the five gates which had to be passed before the wheat-fields were reached. At each of these gates the horses were awkward, and there was some accident. Palmer's man laid the blame on the construction of the gates and the multiplicity of their fastenings. Langridge asseverated that the gates were made after a choice pattern much in use on the best English farms, and, he believed, even on the Queen's own farms. The engine-driver replied that he was sorry to hear it, having always thought Her Majesty to be a sensible woman. They arrived in the stackyard at length. Langridge had everything in readiness for an early start the next morning, and rose at an unearthly hour himself in order to bring his men ‘up to the mark,’ to quote his own words.

When they were fairly started, with all the whirr and clatter of machinery, and the clean bright straw was falling quickly from the straw elevator, and the sacks were filling fast with fine well-ripened grain, the farmer recovered his good temper. The work being almost entirely in the hands of the tribe of men sent by Palmer, he had not so much on his mind, and could amuse himself with counting the grains in ears of wheat that seemed preternaturally large, or arranging samples of the finest on sheets of blue paper, on which they showed to such advantage as to convince him that he would obtain the highest price in the market.

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‘It's a fine yield, Steve,’ he said, ‘a very fine one. I wish, though, Palmer were here to drive his men on; they don't do half as much without him.’

‘You have that man on the stack yet,’ said Stephen. ‘Who is he?’

‘You mean my gentleman stacker, as I call him? I don't know who he is, but I don't think he was brought up to work.’

‘No, evidently not. I believe I have seen him before. You remember our picnic in the ranges near Wishart's property, and that man who played like a demon—I don't know of a better comparison—on the violin. He didn't take the slightest notice of us, he was so absorbed in his music. This is the same man.’

‘I believe you are right. I thought I knew his face. He wasn't quite so seedy then.’

‘Some broken-down gentleman,’ said Stephen.

‘No doubt. Has he got his fiddle here, I wonder. You might ask him to play before your sisters and Miss Desmond; it would be a rare treat.’

‘Oh, I shouldn't like to ask him. People of his kind don't like to be patronised.’

‘Yes, better not, perhaps. He looks as if he'd more pride than pence after all his downcome. There's Palmer, riding like a madman. It's a wonder he doesn't break his neck.’

A horseman appeared in the midst of a cloud of dust, clattering down the road at a furious rate. As page 98 soon as the workmen caught sight of this figure the word was passed round, ‘He's coming!’ and their exertions, which had not been remarkable, were redoubled. ‘We'll have to look alive now,’ observed one. ‘How he will go on! I know by the way he rides.’

‘Just look at those fellows, Steve,’ said the farmer. ‘They've been crawling like snails all the morning, and now their master's in sight they put on a bit of a spurt. Yes, you'd better brush up to your work, or there'll be strange goings-on.’

‘These gates will sweeten his temper,’ said the engine-driver, who seemed to look forward to the ‘goings-on’ with pleasure.

Palmer had to slacken speed when he encountered the gates. Three of them were provided with fasteners that could only be opened by a patient and time-taking individual. Palmer was seen to tug at them desperately, ejaculating fiercely meanwhile. The others were, properly speaking, not gates at all, but slip-panels, which generally refused to slip when one had gone to the trouble of dismounting to remove the rails. His patience was exhausted when the last of these was passed, and springing on horseback again, he dashed up to the stacks at a gallop, his fine black horse white with foam.

‘Good morning, Mr. Palmer,’ said the farmer, in response to a curt greeting. ‘You've been getting over the ground at a fine rate.’

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‘I never waste time on the road. Time is money; some people wouldn't throw it away as they do if they believed that. Why in the name of wonder have you hedged and fenced yourself in with such a number of gates? I have been doing nothing but open and shut gates for the last half-hour.’

‘I've got the farm well divided at last,’ said Langridge.

‘You have chopped it up into dice. I thought you must be trying to keep the caterpillars out. Now then, I'll stir up my fellows.’

There was a visible increase in the alacrity of the ‘fellows’ as their employer drew near. He was a tall and meagre-looking man, his spare frame seeming to be animated by an energy that would allow it no rest. There was the evidence of ill-health on his thin and colourless face, which was rendered yet more remarkable by a tangled mass of black hair worn unusually long and a pair of fierce and sparkling dark eyes which left few objects unnoticed in their owner's path.

‘That engine is in a shockingly dirty condition,’ commenced Palmer, looking at the engine-driver, who happened to be nearest him. ‘My last engine-driver took some pride in keeping it clean, but you, Smithers, have none of that about you. Why, I can hardly distinguish the brasswork, it looks as if you had tarred it.’

‘I clean it as regular as clockwork, I'm sure, page 100 sir,’ protested the engine-driver. ‘I believe I shall scour it away in time.’

‘I daresay. More likely to drive it till there isn't a drop of water in the boiler and blow us all up. You'll hardly credit it, Langridge,’ said Palmer, turning to the farmer, ‘but I once had a man who nearly did for me in that way. He got beyond my control, would heap on coal and get up more steam, till I expected an explosion every minute, and that we should be all involved in one great scald. It didn't go off, though, after all.’

‘Why don't you have a man who understands such things?’

‘Oh, I've had all sorts. I never keep a man long, but I take any one who asks for work. If they don't suit me they go instanter, no matter whether they've been a week, a day, or an hour. I've only had that man at the machine a week, and I expect he'll go before another's out.’

‘But it's so disagreeable to be always in hot water with one's men,’ said Langridge, oblivious of his frequent outbreaks of temper.

‘Hot water? I'm always as cool as a cucumber. I never have more than two words with a man who's not of my sort. I pay him his wages and say “Be off,” and he knows better than to linger. Oh, I say!’—and he addressed himself to a man who was allowing the sacks to fill to overflowing— ‘wouldn't it be as well to fill those a little fuller? You can't squeeze some more in, I suppose, Jones?’ page 101 (this to another); ‘a machine can't grind nothing, though you may think so. Let's see you feed a little quicker. That's a man I picked up off the road, Langridge, two days ago, but I shall send him about his business to-morrow and look out for another.’

‘It's only charitable to give them a turn,’ said Langridge; ‘but he's a queer-looking fellow.’

‘Yes; looks as if he'd graduated at a certain institution near town. But I don't care. So long as a man will work what are character and appearance to me? I try them all.’

‘Well you sometimes hit on a useful man that way,’ said Langridge. ‘Look at that young man on the straw-stack; I picked him up by accident, and he has worked like a Briton. I shan't want him after threshing is over, so if you need another you'd better take him on.’

‘Oh, very likely I shall. I don't like his looks though.’

‘Why, you've just said you don't care for appearances, and he's rather a good-looking fellow.’

‘That's what I mean. You ought to know, Langridge, after employing labour for so many years, that good looks count for less than nothing. If I were choosing a man by his face I should pick an ugly one. A handsome fellow is always thinking of himself, how to show off with his money, and get as much out of his master as he can without spoiling his beauty by hard work. I had a man once who page 102 actually wore a gauze veil when we were thrashing some rather smutty wheat. I was as black as a sweep, but that was nothing to his lordship, who must preserve his fine complexion. I soon dismissed him, and he stole two new indiarubber belts and went off with them. I see I shall have to animate these men by my example: a working master is worth a dozen of the kind who stand by with their arms folded. Mr. Butterfingers’—here Palmer again addressed the unfortunate Jones— ‘you have a most remarkable way of feeding, as if you were afraid the machine would take you in as well as the wheat—and small loss it would be to the world, I must say. Put the stuff through, man, and don't moon over your work like that.’

Palmer pulled off his coat and threw himself into the work with such spirit that the men caught some of his enthusiasm. There were various stoppages and mischances. The large belt broke, and a man had to be sent on horseback for another. When this was remedied the water supply failed, greatly to Langridge's surprise; he thought enough had been carted for at least two days' work. This gave occasion for an ebullition of wrath on his part, and when both he and Palmer were engaged in strife and contention with their men there was indeed a strange Babel in the stackyard. Langridge declared some one had maliciously let off the water, and finally succeeded in convicting Simpkins of the offence. He was discharged on the spot, and Palmer im- page 103 mediately discharged two of his men, for no reason that could be discovered, unless it were to keep him company. Then peace was restored, and as nothing could be done till more water was obtained, it was resolved to break off for that day.

Palmer was pressed to stay all night at the farm, and consented, because he wished to be on the ground to start the work himself the next morning, having, as he said, no confidence in his engine-driver and foreman, though that person had been in his employ longer than any of the other men.

‘I wonder you keep him, then,’ remarked Langridge.

‘I suppose because the man has an oily tongue, and gets round me. I have a weak point or two, and he has found them out.’

‘I'll show you your room,’ said Langridge. ‘You'll be glad of a wash before tea.’

‘Oh, I'm all right,’ carelessly replied Palmer, who considered enough had been done when he had washed his hands at the tank and put on his coat again after flapping it a little.

‘But you look so hot and dusty,’

‘Looks! what do I care for looks?’

‘But you'd feel better after a wash.’

‘Feel! what do I care for feelings?’

The farmer was obliged to induct the guest as he was into the presence of Mrs. Langridge and her daughters. They knew him too well to be surprised at his untidy appearance, his wild and rambling conversation, page 104 or the number of times his cup needed refilling with strong tea unflavoured with milk or sugar.

Any intelligent listener at that tea-table ought to have amassed a great deal of valuable information concerning the statistics of the year's wheat harvest. Palmer could give the acreage of each wheat crop, and its probable or ascertained yield. Langridge knew exactly how the crop had been put in, what fertilisers had been used, and how much seed had been sown to the acre. Together they criticised the doings of their neighbours very freely. How there was no doubt that Robinson was ruining himself by slovenly farming, and how it was positively sickening to look at his fields, where docks had long since triumphed in the struggle for existence—Palmer affirming that sacks which ought to have contained wheat alone were more than half-full of dock seed. Also, how Johnson had brought thin sowing to such a pitch that in his fields the wheat ears were not within hail of one another. And how Wingrove had very fair crops, but was mortgaged head over ears, and could not hold on much longer; and how several others were in the same condition. And finally (this from Mr. Langridge), how farming did not, would not, and could not pay.

The young lady visitor who had been listening to this dialogue of the bucolics took advantage of a pause in the flow of words to say, ‘But I thought all the farmers here were well off. Every one seems so page 105 happy and comfortable. I have always thought of New Zealand as a land of plenty, where there was no such thing as poverty.’

‘Whether there may be a country where there is no such thing as poverty, I don't know,’ said Palmer; ‘but I am sure of one thing, that wherever farmers abound there you will hear grumbling. I could name a good many in this land of plenty, Miss Desmond, who neither look unhappy nor uncomfortable, and yet, if we are to believe them, they are miserably poor.’

‘Poor; we're all as poor as Job,’ said Langridge.

‘Before he lost his property or after?’ asked Stephen.

‘Well,’ said Langridge, remembering that, like the patriarch, he was blessed with land, with sheep and cattle, with menservants and maidservants, and that moreover he had ripe corn in his fields and cash in the bank, ‘there are different ways of being poor.’

‘Ah,’ said the young lady, laughing at him a little, ‘if I am ever to be poor may I be poor in your way. The poverty I saw in England was very different from yours. Your working men are rich compared with English farm-labourers. I cannot understand why you don't all grow rich.’

‘Well, some of us do,’ said Palmer; ‘some of our farmers even; though, as you know, Langridge, farming doesn't pay. Nothing pays; that's the conclusion I have come to. When I go into the town I find the tradesmen croaking about the times page 106 being hard and trade bad, and when I'm in the country every farmer I meet swears that he's on the road to ruin. They live, of course, and support their families on nothing a year, I suppose.’

‘You may joke as you please,’ said Langridge, ‘but you know as well as any one how it is with us. High wages, high rents, high rates of interest, everything dear a farmer has to buy, and everything he has to sell monstrously cheap.’

‘Yes; I know how it is with many of you. High wages are good for the labourer, as Miss Desmond has found out, but they don't suit the farmer quite so well, especially when wheat's low. The worst of it is that in this country men attempt to farm without capital. Often when a farmer is favoured with a good harvest, all he can make is condemned beforehand. Very likely he has put his crop in with borrowed money, and as likely as not he has to go to the money-lender again before he can reap it. If his land is his own so much the better; but very often it isn't, and rent or interest on a big mortgage makes a hole in his profits. If he has a good harvest we'll suppose he pays his way, and has something left for himself. But if his crop is a failure—well, he sinks a little deeper in debt, and so one rubs on from year to year.’

‘Yes, that's the way in this beautiful country,’ gruffly assented Langridge.

‘But surely that is not the fault of the country?’ said Miss Desmond, who was lately from England, page 107 and felt interested in these matters because they were new to her. ‘I don't understand, perhaps, but I think farmers ought not to have much to do with money-lenders and high rates of interest.’

‘I am sure Miss Desmond is quite right,’ said Stephen, who had lent his ear to the conversation as soon as that lady took a part in it, and would have agreed with any observation she had pleased to make. ‘Why don't men begin in a small way and work steadily upwards, instead of buying farms with borrowed money and cultivating them with other persons' capital?’

‘Why, Steve, what do you know about it?’ cried Langridge in astonishment, for it was the first time his son had been heard to speak on such a subject. ‘Hark to him, Polly,’ he whispered to his wife, ‘the boy's coming out of his shell.’

‘Yes, coming out fast enough,’ responded Mrs. Langridge in the same muffled tones.

‘Oh, of course I know nothing from my own experience,’ Stephen answered, ‘but one hears of it constantly. There is plenty about it in the papers. I read an article lately which seemed to prove that we were all bankrupt together.’

‘Bankrupt! rubbish!’ said Palmer, who was never very polite to the younger Langridge. ‘If you pin your faith to the newspapers I don't know what you may not come to believe in. What is the matter with us is that we don't know when we are well off. Most classes live better and spend far more—I don't know page 108 about saving—than those in the same rank of life in England. Only, from the Government downwards we're inclined to run to the money-lender too often. We're a nation of borrowers, and we are all in haste to be rich; we must have everything at once, so very often it's grasp all, lose all.’

‘Palmer is getting quite philosophical,’ said Stephen to one of his sisters.

‘People calculate most things nowadays,’ resumed Palmer. ‘I should like to see a calculation of the average number of those who succeed in each particular trade or profession. How many farmers out of the thousand make their fortunes?’—(‘None,’ interjected Langridge)—‘how many private soldiers rise from the ranks to be generals? how many lawyers reason themselves into a judgeship? or how many bank clerks become managers?’

‘Very few indeed,’ said Stephen mournfully. He had been in a bank for a few months and had not liked it.

‘Dear me, what does it matter if they don't succeed, if they live comfortably and bring up their families respectably?’ said good-natured Mrs. Langridge, who, in her handsome afternoon dress, and with her comely face shaded by a white lace cap, looked particularly comfortable and respectable.

‘Oh, to some of us it matters everything,’ said Palmer. ‘It is easy to preach content, but who believes in it? Who is contented with his lot? I must say I don't admire the man who is. The page 109 leaven of discontent which is always to be found in human nature has been of great use in the world. Should we have done anything at all without it? Geniuses are always intensely discontented; talent of every kind is only discontent finding out flaws everywhere around itself and seeking to remedy them. What is success but the result of continued discontent with everything mean and commonplace, and continued striving for a higher position? Men who have that in them must get to the top of the tree.’

‘Why, now, in my opinion,’ said the farmer, ‘people of that kind never do much in the world. I like to see a man stick to his work, not fly off after every fine new idea. He won't succeed in business if half his time he's up in the clouds. It amazes me to see how some men dream away their time. There's that decayed gentleman I have working here. He hadn't a shilling in his pocket, I'll be bound, and looked as if his meals hadn't been very regular lately, yet the first time I saw him he was carelessly leaning against the gate sketching us all at work, and maybe would never have thought of helping, needy as he was, if I hadn't asked him.’

‘I suppose he is one of the geniuses who are intensely discontented with common things—work, for example,’ said Stephen, with a laugh.

‘No, he works well,’ said the farmer. ‘Very likely he's discontented though. Such poor fellows who've lost money and position and everything can't very well be content.’

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‘And ought not,’ said Palmer. ‘He belongs to a class as miserable as any I know of. The outcasts of gentility have a natural tendency to drift to the colonies; but they don't make good colonists in any sense of the word.’

Miss Desmond looked at the speaker with a serious and thoughtful gaze.

‘Then do they never regain the position they have lost?’ she asked.

‘Very few,’ said Palmer. ‘Where one succeeds in doing so ten go down lower and lower.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it is a great pity.’ She seemed a little nervous in her manner, and looked away from the others.

‘Very good of you to pity such fellows, Miss Desmond,’ said Palmer; ‘but perhaps you wouldn't if you knew more about them. I've known many a plain working man make his way upwards step by step, but I never knew a gentleman scapegrace do anything but explore the road which leads to ruin.’

‘Does no one try to help them?’ she said in a low voice.

‘Yes, they are helped oftener than more deserving people, I'm afraid. But what can you do for a man who won't help himself? These men have most of them heaped such disgrace on themselves that they can never go back to their homes. Not that their families wouldn't take them back—in most cases they would—yes, even the worst of them. But they've cut themselves off from everything that is page 111 pure and good—they are not even worth the thought of a kind-hearted young lady like yourself.’

She coloured faintly and looked down. Stephen could not help noticing her, and did not look pleased with what he saw. The farmer continued to remark on the difficulty if not impossibility of making a fortune in New Zealand. Palmer hastily affirmed that it mattered very little; fortune-making ought not to be the end and aim of every man's life. ‘What's the good of money?’ he demanded, staring almost fiercely at Langridge.

‘The good of money!’ the farmer repeated, aghast at this question. ‘Whatever do you mean? Can you do without it, or can I, or any one else?’

‘We can do without fortunes. Some men who get them are just as great failures as the poor fellows we've been talking about. Money smothers an immensity of talent. A rich man is weighed down by his money bags, and has no inducement to do anything. The same man without a penny in his pocket would be obliged to work either with his hands or his rusty mental machinery. If he had any worth mentioning he would use the latter and bring some lost talent to light.’

‘It's all very well to talk like that,’ said Langridge, ‘but very little talent would come to light if it wasn't for money. I've always understood money encouraged talent, and, say what you like, all your geniuses sell their work for it, and sell it pretty dear too nowadays.’

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‘I say that money is unduly valued,’ said Palmer, ‘especially in new countries such as this. All our endeavour is for money. Money, and how to get it, is the commonest theme of conversation. You, yourself, Langridge, don't you oftener talk of what can be made by farming than anything else, unless it is to complain that you can't make enough? Do you take any interest in any subject that isn't some way or other connected with money, and do you know any farmer who does?’

‘Well, if you will browbeat me at my own table,’ said Langridge good-humouredly, ‘I wish you'd say what I am to talk about. You know I'm not well-educated. I've read precious little. I've had no time to study, and I don't suppose other settlers are better in that way. We know very little; and as our travelling ended when we came to this country we haven't seen much. So what on earth are we to talk about, except what we do every day on our farms, and what we make by them?’

Palmer laughed, and vouchsafed no other answer to this appeal. Langridge, who felt sure that his friend was what he called ‘off his head,’ led the conversation back again to matters nearer his heart, and forgetting Palmer's tirade against such topics, dared to talk of a rotation of crops which he had thought out, and which was the most likely to call forth all the virtues of the soil, and to yield a good profit. Palmer flatly denied the efficacy of any rotation of crops. Langridge was so deeply shocked by the page 113 utterance of such rank heresy that he could not combat it Mrs. Langridge and the young ladies betook themselves to the drawing-room. Palmer went down to the stacks to see if all was well there. He was haunted by the fear that some injury might be done to his machinery—a workman whom he had suddenly discharged having gone away breathing forth threatenings of dire import.

‘What a tremendous fellow Palmer is to talk!’ the farmer said to his son when they were sitting on the verandah smoking. ‘He has got some queer ideas—from reading his old books, I suppose. They say he sits up till near midnight poring over them. He'll read his senses away if he doesn't take care. There's something gone in his head, you may depend on it, Steve.’

‘I don't know what may be gone from it,’ said Stephen. ‘I know there's enough left in it yet to enable him to make himself thoroughly disagreeable’—Palmer had snubbed him several times that evening—‘I believe he was trying to show off before Miss Desmond.’

‘Aha! I daresay you think everyone's anxious to show off before her,’ said his father with a chuckle. ‘Take care you don't overdo it yourself.’