It was late in the evening when Philip arrived at Ferne. It was Mrs.
Athelny’s native village, and she had been accustomed from her
childhood to pick in the hop-field to which with her husband and her
children she still went every year. Like many Kentish folk her family
had gone out regularly, glad to earn a little money, but especially
regarding the annual outing, looked forward to for months, as the best
of holidays. The work was not hard, it was done in common, in the open
air, and for the children it was a long, delightful picnic; here the
young men met the maidens; in the long evenings when work was over they
wandered about the lanes, making love; and the hopping season was
generally followed by weddings. They went out in carts with bedding,
pots and pans, chairs and tables; and Ferne while the hopping lasted
was deserted. They were very exclusive and would have resented the
intrusion of foreigners, as they called the people who came from
London; they looked down upon them and feared them too; they were a
rough lot, and the respectable country folk did not want to mix with
them. In the old days the hoppers slept in barns, but ten years ago a
row of huts had been erected at the side of a meadow; and the Athelnys,
like many others, had the same hut every year.
Athelny met Philip at the station in a cart he had borrowed from the
public-house at which he had got a room for Philip. It was a quarter of
a mile from the hop-field. They left his bag there and walked over to
the meadow in which were the huts. They were nothing more than a long,
low shed, divided into little rooms about twelve feet square. In front
of each was a fire of sticks, round which a family was grouped, eagerly
watching the cooking of supper. The sea-air and the sun had browned
already the faces of Athelny’s children. Mrs. Athelny seemed a
different woman in her sun-bonnet: you felt that the long years in the
city had made no real difference to her; she was the country woman born
and bred, and you could see how much at home she found herself in the
country. She was frying bacon and at the same time keeping an eye on
the younger children, but she had a hearty handshake and a jolly smile
for Philip. Athelny was enthusiastic over the delights of a rural
existence.
“We’re starved for sun and light in the cities we live in. It isn’t
life, it’s a long imprisonment. Let us sell all we have, Betty, and
take a farm in the country.”
“I can see you in the country,” she answered with good-humoured scorn.
“Why, the first rainy day we had in the winter you’d be crying for
London.” She turned to Philip. “Athelny’s always like this when we come
down here. Country, I like that! Why, he don’t know a swede from a
mangel-wurzel.”
“Daddy was lazy today,” remarked Jane, with the frankness which
characterized her, “he didn’t fill one bin.”
“I’m getting into practice, child, and tomorrow I shall fill more bins
than all of you put together.”
“Come and eat your supper, children,” said Mrs. Athelny. “Where’s
Sally?”
“Here I am, mother.”
She stepped out of their little hut, and the flames of the wood fire
leaped up and cast sharp colour upon her face. Of late Philip had only
seen her in the trim frocks she had taken to since she was at the
dressmaker’s, and there was something very charming in the print dress
she wore now, loose and easy to work in; the sleeves were tucked up and
showed her strong, round arms. She too had a sun-bonnet.
“You look like a milkmaid in a fairy story,” said Philip, as he shook
hands with her.
“She’s the belle of the hop-fields,” said Athelny. “My word, if the
Squire’s son sees you he’ll make you an offer of marriage before you
can say Jack Robinson.”
“The Squire hasn’t got a son, father,” said Sally.
She looked about for a place to sit down in, and Philip made room for
her beside him. She looked wonderful in the night lit by wood fires.
She was like some rural goddess, and you thought of those fresh, strong
girls whom old Herrick had praised in exquisite numbers. The supper was
simple, bread and butter, crisp bacon, tea for the children, and beer
for Mr. and Mrs. Athelny and Philip. Athelny, eating hungrily, praised
loudly all he ate. He flung words of scorn at Lucullus and piled
invectives upon Brillat-Savarin.
“There’s one thing one can say for you, Athelny,” said his wife, “you
do enjoy your food and no mistake!”
“Cooked by your hand, my Betty,” he said, stretching out an eloquent
forefinger.
Philip felt himself very comfortable. He looked happily at the line of
fires, with people grouped about them, and the colour of the flames
against the night; at the end of the meadow was a line of great elms,
and above the starry sky. The children talked and laughed, and Athelny,
a child among them, made them roar by his tricks and fancies.
“They think a rare lot of Athelny down here,” said his wife. “Why, Mrs.
Bridges said to me, I don’t know what we should do without Mr. Athelny
now, she said. He’s always up to something, he’s more like a schoolboy
than the father of a family.”
Sally sat in silence, but she attended to Philip’s wants in a
thoughtful fashion that charmed him. It was pleasant to have her beside
him, and now and then he glanced at her sunburned, healthy face. Once
he caught her eyes, and she smiled quietly. When supper was over Jane
and a small brother were sent down to a brook that ran at the bottom of
the meadow to fetch a pail of water for washing up.
“You children, show your Uncle Philip where we sleep, and then you must
be thinking of going to bed.”
Small hands seized Philip, and he was dragged towards the hut. He went
in and struck a match. There was no furniture in it; and beside a tin
box, in which clothes were kept, there was nothing but the beds; there
were three of them, one against each wall. Athelny followed Philip in
and showed them proudly.
“That’s the stuff to sleep on,” he cried. “None of your
spring-mattresses and swansdown. I never sleep so soundly anywhere as
here. YOU will sleep between sheets. My dear fellow, I pity you from
the bottom of my soul.”
The beds consisted of a thick layer of hopvine, on the top of which was
a coating of straw, and this was covered with a blanket. After a day in
the open air, with the aromatic scent of the hops all round them, the
happy pickers slept like tops. By nine o’clock all was quiet in the
meadow and everyone in bed but one or two men who still lingered in the
public-house and would not come back till it was closed at ten. Athelny
walked there with Philip. But before he went Mrs. Athelny said to him:
“We breakfast about a quarter to six, but I daresay you won’t want to
get up as early as that. You see, we have to set to work at six.”
“Of course he must get up early,” cried Athelny, “and he must work like
the rest of us. He’s got to earn his board. No work, no dinner, my
lad.”
“The children go down to bathe before breakfast, and they can give you
a call on their way back. They pass The Jolly Sailor.”
“If they’ll wake me I’ll come and bathe with them,” said Philip.
Jane and Harold and Edward shouted with delight at the prospect, and
next morning Philip was awakened out of a sound sleep by their bursting
into his room. The boys jumped on his bed, and he had to chase them out
with his slippers. He put on a coat and a pair of trousers and went
down. The day had only just broken, and there was a nip in the air; but
the sky was cloudless, and the sun was shining yellow. Sally, holding
Connie’s hand, was standing in the middle of the road, with a towel and
a bathing-dress over her arm. He saw now that her sun-bonnet was of the
colour of lavender, and against it her face, red and brown, was like an
apple. She greeted him with her slow, sweet smile, and he noticed
suddenly that her teeth were small and regular and very white. He
wondered why they had never caught his attention before.
“I was for letting you sleep on,” she said, “but they would go up and
wake you. I said you didn’t really want to come.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
They walked down the road and then cut across the marshes. That way it
was under a mile to the sea. The water looked cold and gray, and Philip
shivered at the sight of it; but the others tore off their clothes and
ran in shouting. Sally did everything a little slowly, and she did not
come into the water till all the rest were splashing round Philip.
Swimming was his only accomplishment; he felt at home in the water; and
soon he had them all imitating him as he played at being a porpoise,
and a drowning man, and a fat lady afraid of wetting her hair. The
bathe was uproarious, and it was necessary for Sally to be very severe
to induce them all to come out.
“You’re as bad as any of them,” she said to Philip, in her grave,
maternal way, which was at once comic and touching. “They’re not
anything like so naughty when you’re not here.”
They walked back, Sally with her bright hair streaming over one
shoulder and her sun-bonnet in her hand, but when they got to the huts
Mrs. Athelny had already started for the hop-garden. Athleny, in a pair
of the oldest trousers anyone had ever worn, his jacket buttoned up to
show he had no shirt on, and in a wide-brimmed soft hat, was frying
kippers over a fire of sticks. He was delighted with himself: he looked
every inch a brigand. As soon as he saw the party he began to shout the
witches’ chorus from Macbeth over the odorous kippers.
“You mustn’t dawdle over your breakfast or mother will be angry,” he
said, when they came up.
And in a few minutes, Harold and Jane with pieces of bread and butter
in their hands, they sauntered through the meadow into the hop-field.
They were the last to leave. A hop-garden was one of the sights
connected with Philip’s boyhood and the oast-houses to him the most
typical feature of the Kentish scene. It was with no sense of
strangeness, but as though he were at home, that Philip followed Sally
through the long lines of the hops. The sun was bright now and cast a
sharp shadow. Philip feasted his eyes on the richness of the green
leaves. The hops were yellowing, and to him they had the beauty and the
passion which poets in Sicily have found in the purple grape. As they
walked along Philip felt himself overwhelmed by the rich luxuriance. A
sweet scent arose from the fat Kentish soil, and the fitful September
breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops. Athelstan felt
the exhilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice and sang; it
was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally turned round.
“You be quiet, Athelstan, or we shall have a thunderstorm.”
In a moment they heard the hum of voices, and in a moment more came
upon the pickers. They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as
they picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their
baskets by their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops
they picked straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a
good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on
the soft brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a
great deal. The women worked busily, they had been pickers from
childhood, and they could pick twice as fast as foreigners from London.
They boasted about the number of bushels they had picked in a day, but
they complained you could not make money now as in former times: then
they paid you a shilling for five bushels, but now the rate was eight
and even nine bushels to the shilling. In the old days a good picker
could earn enough in the season to keep her for the rest of the year,
but now there was nothing in it; you got a holiday for nothing, and
that was about all. Mrs. Hill had bought herself a pianner out of what
she made picking, so she said, but she was very near, one wouldn’t like
to be near like that, and most people thought it was only what she
said, if the truth was known perhaps it would be found that she had put
a bit of money from the savings bank towards it.
The hoppers were divided into bin companies of ten pickers, not
counting children, and Athelny loudly boasted of the day when he would
have a company consisting entirely of his own family. Each company had
a bin-man, whose duty it was to supply it with strings of hops at their
bins (the bin was a large sack on a wooden frame, about seven feet
high, and long rows of them were placed between the rows of hops;) and
it was to this position that Athelny aspired when his family was old
enough to form a company. Meanwhile he worked rather by encouraging
others than by exertions of his own. He sauntered up to Mrs. Athelny,
who had been busy for half an hour and had already emptied a basket
into the bin, and with his cigarette between his lips began to pick. He
asserted that he was going to pick more than anyone that day, but
mother; of course no one could pick so much as mother; that reminded
him of the trials which Aphrodite put upon the curious Psyche, and he
began to tell his children the story of her love for the unseen
bridegroom. He told it very well. It seemed to Philip, listening with a
smile on his lips, that the old tale fitted in with the scene. The sky
was very blue now, and he thought it could not be more lovely even in
Greece. The children with their fair hair and rosy cheeks, strong,
healthy, and vivacious; the delicate form of the hops; the challenging
emerald of the leaves, like a blare of trumpets; the magic of the green
alley, narrowing to a point as you looked down the row, with the
pickers in their sun-bonnets: perhaps there was more of the Greek
spirit there than you could find in the books of professors or in
museums. He was thankful for the beauty of England. He thought of the
winding white roads and the hedgerows, the green meadows with their
elm-trees, the delicate line of the hills and the copses that crowned
them, the flatness of the marshes, and the melancholy of the North Sea.
He was very glad that he felt its loveliness. But presently Athelny
grew restless and announced that he would go and ask how Robert Kemp’s
mother was. He knew everyone in the garden and called them all by their
Christian names; he knew their family histories and all that had
happened to them from birth. With harmless vanity he played the fine
gentleman among them, and there was a touch of condescension in his
familiarity. Philip would not go with him.
“I’m going to earn my dinner,” he said.
“Quite right, my boy,” answered Athelny, with a wave of the hand, as he
strolled away. “No work, no dinner.”