Another
Gentleman Now Has His Fourth Wife, And He, Too, Is A Most Strenuous
Believer, And Not His Bitterest Enemy Can Rake Up The Smallest Accusation
Against His Character.
He, too, is a strong and upright man, fully
capable of another wife if time should chance to bring it about.
Now, the
odd part of it is that, having married four times, and each time in the
same village, where all the families are more or less connected, he is
more or less related to every single individual in the parish. First,
there are his own blood relations and his wives' blood relations, and
then there are their relations' relations, and next his sons and
daughters have married and introduced a fresh roll, and I really do not
think either he or anybody else knows exactly where the list ends. This
is nothing uncommon. Though clans and tribes no longer settle under their
respective chiefs in villages, the families of the same name and blood
still present a very close representation of the clan system. They have
all the tribal relationship without any of its feeling. Instead of
forming a strong body and helping each other, these people seemed to
detest one another, and to lose no opportunity of snatching some little
advantage or telling some scandalous tale. In fact, this in-and-in
breeding seems one of the curses of village life, and a cause of
stagnation and narrowness of mind. This marrying and giving in marriage
is not singular to well-to-do leaders of chapel society, but goes on with
equal fervour among the lower members. The cottage girls and cottage boys
marry the instant they get a chance, and it is not at all uncommon to
find comparatively young labourers who have had two wives. There is
nothing in this to reproach: it is a peculiarity of the cast of mind
which I am endeavouring to describe - a cast of mind perhaps not much
marked by sentimentality. Something in this practice reminds one of the
Mormons. Certainly the wives are not taken together, but they are sealed
as fast as circumstances permit. Something in it has a Mormonite aspect
to an observer, and perhaps the existence of this cast of mind may assist
in explaining the inexplicable growth of that strange religion. Doubtless
they would repudiate the suggestion with loud outcries and indignation,
for people are always most vigorous in denouncing themselves
unconsciously. These numerous wives (who are quite willing), the marrying
of sisters, the primitive gatherings at the chapel, so like the religious
camps of the Far West, the general relationship, have a distinct flavour
of Salt Lake. Add to this the immense working power of these pluralist
giants, for you will generally find that the well-to-do chapeller with
his third wife, or more, is a man who has raised himself from very much
nothing to very much something. By sheer force of labour and push he has
lifted himself head and shoulders above the village - a career, too,
conspicuous by strict integrity. Did he live in a London suburb he would
be pointed out to the rising generation by anxious fathers as the very
model for them to follow. The village ought to be proud of them, but the
village secretly and aside hates them, being practical commentaries on
the general sloth and stupidity. This energy of work, too, is like the
saints of Utah, who have made an oasis and a garden where was a desert.
After labouring from morning till night they like the sound of a feminine
voice and the warmth of a feminine welcome in the back parlour of rest.
This four times married elder - what work, what a pyramid of work, his
life represents! The young labourer left with his mother and brothers and
sisters to keep, learning carpentering, and bettering his wages - learning
mason-work, picking up the way to manage machinery, inspiring men with
confidence, and beginning to get the leverage of borrowed money, getting
a good name at the bank, managing a little farm, contracting for
building, contracting for hauling - onwards to a larger farm, larger
buildings, big contracts in rising towns, somehow or other grinding money
out of everything by force of will, bending everything to his purpose by
stubborn sinew, always truthful, straightforward, and genuine. Consider
what immense labour this represent! I do not think many such men can be
found, rude and unlettered, yet naturally gentleman-like, to work their
way in the world without the aid of the Lombard Street financiers; in
village life, remember, where all is stagnant and dull - no golden
openings such as occur near great towns. On work-days still wearing the
same old hat - I wonder what material it was originally? - tough leather
probably - its fibres soaked with mortar, its shine replaced by lime, its
shape dented by bricks, its rotundity flattened by timber, stuck about
with cow's hair - for a milker leans his head against the animal - sodden
with rain, and still the same old hat. The same old hat, that Teniers
might have introduced, a regular daub of a hat: pity it is that it will
never be painted. On Sundays the high silk hat, the glossy black coat of
the elder, but there are no gloves to be got on such hands as those; they
are too big and too real ever to be got into the artificiality of kid.
Everything grew under those hands; if there was a rabbit-hutch in the
back yard it became a shed, and a stable sprang up by the shed, and a
sawpit out of the stable, and a workshop beyond the sawpit, and cottages
to let beyond that; next a market garden and a brick-kiln, and a
hop-oast, and a few acres of freehold meadow, and by-and-by some villas;
all increasing and multiplying, and leading to enterprises in distant,
places - such a mighty generation after generation of solid things! A most
earnest and conscientious chapel man, welcoming the budding Paul and
Silas, steadily feeding the resident apostle, furnishing him with garden
produce and a side of bacon when the pig was killed, arranging a vicarage
for him at a next-to-nothing rent; lending him horse and trap, providing
innumerable bottles of three-star brandy for these men of God, and
continual pipes for the prophets; supplying the chapel fund with credit
in time of monetary difficulty - the very right arm and defender of the
faith.
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