The Captain's Death Bed & Other Essays. Virginia Woolf
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unobserved. It is not reading; it is ruminating.
James Woodforde, then, was one of those smooth-cheeked, steady-eyed men, demure to look at, whom we can never imagine except in the prime of life. He was of an equable temper, with only such acerbities and touchinesses as are generally to be found in those who have had a love affair in their youth and remained, as they fancy, unwed because of it. The Parson’s love affair, however, was nothing very tremendous. Once when he was a young man in Somerset he liked to walk over to Shepton and to visit a certain “sweet-tempered” Betsy White who lived there. He had a great mind “to make a bold stroke” and ask her to marry him. He went so far, indeed, as to propose marriage “when opportunity served” and Betsy was willing. But he delayed; time passed; four years passed, indeed, and Betsy went to Devonshire, met a Mr. Webster who had five hundred pounds a year, and married him. When James Woodforde met them in the turnpike road, he could say little, “being shy”, but to his diary he remarked—and this no doubt was his private version of the affair ever after—“she has proved herself to me a mere jilt.”
But he was a young man then, and as time went on we cannot help suspecting that he was glad to consider the question of marriage shelved once and for all, so that he might settle down with his niece Nancy at Weston Longueville and give himself simply and solely, every day and all day, to the great business of living. What else to call it we do not know. It seems to be life itself.
For James Woodforde was nothing in particular. Life had it all her own way with him. He had no special gift; he had no oddity or infirmity. It is idle to pretend that he was a zealous priest. God in Heaven was much the same to him as King George upon the throne—a kindly monarch, that is to say, whose festivals one kept by preaching a sermon on Sunday much as one kept the royal birthday by firing a blunderbuss and drinking a toast at dinner. Should anything untoward happen, like the death of a boy who was dragged and killed by a horse, he would instantly, but rather perfunctorily, exclaim: “I hope to God the Poor Boy is happy,” and add: “We all came home singing;” just as when Justice Creed’s peacock spread its tail—“and most noble it is”—he would exclaim: “How wonderful are Thy Works O God in every Being.” But there was no fanaticism, no enthusiasm, no lyric impulse about James Woodforde. In all these pages, indeed, each so neatly divided into compartments, and each of those again filled, as the days themselves were, so quietly and fully in a hand like the pacing of a well-tempered nag, one can only call to mind a single poetic phrase about the transit of Venus, how “It appeared as a black patch upon a fair Lady’s face.” The words themselves are mild enough, but they hang over the undulating expanse of the Parson’s prose with the resplendence of the star itself. So in the fen country a barn or a tree appears twice its natural size against the surrounding flats. But what led him to this palpable excess that summer’s night we do not know. It cannot have been that he was drunk. He spoke out too roundly against such failings in his brother Jack to have been guilty himself. Jack was the wild one of the family. Jack drank at the “Catherine Wheel”. Jack came home and had the impudence to defend suicide to his old father. James himself drank his pint of port, but he was a man who liked his meat. When we think of the Woodfordes, uncle and niece, we think of them as often as not waiting with some impatience for their dinner. They gravely watch the joint set upon the table; they swiftly get their knives and forks to work upon the succulent leg or loin, and without much comment, unless a word is passed about the gravy or the stuffing, go on eating. They munch, day after day, year after year, until they have devoured herds of sheep and oxen, flocks of poultry, an odd dozen or so of swans and cygnets, bushels of apples and plums, while the pastries and the jellies crumble and squash beneath their spoons in mountains, in pyramids, in pagodas. Never was there a book so stuffed with food as this one is. To read the bill of fare respectfully and punctually set forth gives one a sense of repletion. It is as if one had lunched at Simpsons daily for a week. Trout and chicken, mutton and peas, pork and apple sauce—so the joints succeed each other at dinner; and there is supper with more joints still to come, all, no doubt, home grown, and of the juiciest and sweetest; all cooked, often by the mistress herself, in the plainest English way, save when the dinner was at Weston Hall and Mrs. Custance surprised them with a London dainty—a pyramid of jelly, that is to say, with a “landscape appearing through it”. Then Mrs. Custance, for whom James Woodforde had a chivalrous devotion, would play the “Sticcardi Pastorale” and make “very soft music indeed”; or would get out her work-box and show them how neatly contrived it was, unless indeed Mrs. Custance were giving birth to another child upstairs, whom the Parson would baptize and very frequently bury. The Parson had a deep respect for the Custances. They were all that country gentry should be—a little given to the habit of keeping mistresses, perhaps, but that peccadillo could be forgiven them in view of their generosity to the poor, the kindness they showed to Nancy, and their condescension in asking the Parson to dinner when they had great people staying with them. Yet great people were not much to James’s liking. Deeply though he respected the nobility, “one must confess,” he said, “that being with our equals is much more agreeable.”
He was too fond of his ease and too shrewd a judge of the values of things to be much troubled with snobbery; he much preferred the quiet of his own fireside to adventuring after dissipation abroad. If an old man brought a Madagascar monkey to the door, or a Polish dwarf or a balloon was being shown at Norwich, the Parson would go and have a look at them, and be free with his shillings, but he was a quiet man, a man without ambition, and it is more than likely that his niece found him a little dull. It is the niece Nancy, to speak plainly, who makes us uneasy. There are the seeds of domestic disaster in her character, unless we mistake. It is true that on the afternoon of April 27th, 1780, she expressed a wish to read Aristotle’s philosophy, which Miss Millard had got of a married woman, but she is a stolid girl; she eats too much, she grumbles too much, and she takes too much to heart the loss of her red box. No doubt she was sensible enough; we will not blame her for being pert and saucy, or for losing her temper at cards, or even for hiding the parcel that came by post when her uncle longed to know what was in it, and had never done such a thing by her. But when we compare her with Betsy Davy, we realize that one human being has only to come into the room to raise our spirits, and another sets us on edge merely by the way she blows her nose. Betsy, the daughter of that frivolous wanton Mrs. Davy (who fell downstairs the day Miss Donne swallowed the barleycorn with its stalk), Betsy the shy little girl, Betsy livening up and playing with the Parson’s wig, Betsy falling in love with Mr. Walker, Betsy receiving the present of a fox’s brush from him, Betsy compromising her reputation with a scamp, Betsy bereaved of him—for Mr. Walker died at the age of twenty-three and was buried in a plain coffin—Betsy left, it is to be feared, in a very scandalous condition—Betsy always charms; we forgive Betsy anything. The trouble with Nancy is that she is beginning to find Weston dull. No suitor has yet appeared. It is but too likely that the ten years of Parson Woodforde’s life that still remain will often have to record how Nancy teased him with her grumbling.
The ten years that remain—one knows, of course, that it must come to an end. Already the Custances have gone to Bath; the Parson has had a touch of gout; far away, with a sound like distant thunder, we hear the guns of the French Revolution. But it is comforting to observe that the imprisonment of the French king and queen, and the anarchy and confusion in Paris, are only mentioned after it has been recorded that Thomas Ram has lost his cow and that Parson Woodforde has “brewed another Barrell of Table Beer to-day”. We have a notion, indeed—and here it must be confessed that we have given up reading Parson Woodforde altogether, and merely tell over the story on a stroll through fields where the hares are scampering and the rooks rising above the elm trees—we have a notion that Parson Woodforde does not die. Parson Woodforde goes on. It is we who change and perish. It is the kings and queens who lie in prison. It is the great towns that are ravaged with anarchy and confusion. But the river Wensum still flows; Mrs. Custance is brought to bed of yet another baby; there is the first swallow of the year. The spring comes, and summer with its hay and its strawberries; then autumn, when the walnuts are exceptionally fine, though the pears are poor; so we lapse into winter, which is indeed boisterous, but the house, thank God, withstands the storm; and then again there is the first swallow, and Parson Woodforde takes his greyhounds out a-coursing.
[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 20, 1927]
Crabbe.