PART I: TOM_The Four Roads

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THE FOUR ROADS

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

Author of “Sussex Gorse,” “The Challenge to Sirius,” etc.

[Illustration]

New York

George H. Doran Company

By George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAGE

PART I

TOM 9

PART II

JERRY 66

PART III

THYRZA 115

PART IV

IVY 153

PART V

NELL 211

PART VI

BABY 241

PART VII

MR. SUMPTION 264

THE FOUR ROADS

PART I: TOM

Four roads in Sussex mark out a patch of country that from the

wooded, sea-viewing hills behind Dallington slips down over fields

and ponds and spinneys to the marshes of Hailsham and Horse Eye. The

North Road, slatting the heights with its pale, hard streak, runs

from far Rye to further Lewes, a road of adventures and distances,

passing Woods Corner and Three Cups Corner, Punnetts Town and Cade

Street, till it joins the London Road at Cross-in-Hand. The South

Road borders the marsh, sometimes dry on the shelving ground above

it, sometimes soggy on the marsh level, or perhaps sheeted with the

overflow of the Hurst Haven. It comes from Senlac and Hastings, and

after skirting the flats, crosses the River Cuckmere, and runs tamely

into Lewes, where all roads meet. The East Road is short and shaggy,

running through many woods, from the North Road, which it joins at

Woods Corner, to the throws at Boreham Street. Along this road is a

string of farms—Cowlease, and Padgham, and Slivericks, mangy holdings

for the most part, with copses running wild and fields of thistles,

doors agape and walls atumble, and gable-ends stooping towards

the ponds. The West Road is grass-grown, and in July St. John’s

wort and rest-harrow straggle in the ruts and make the dust smell

sickly-sweet. It forks from the North Road at Punnetts Town, and runs

through Rushlake Green and the Foul Mile to Hailsham in the south.

In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr.

Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods

Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by

the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street,

in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector

or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had

a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the

East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to

the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular

Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being

midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could

be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine,

like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and

wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and

a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a

beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes

were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water

under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very

white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece.

As he walked he muttered to himself, and from time to time cracked

the joints of his fingers with a loud rapping sound. These two

habits helped form the local opinion that he was “queer,” an opinion

bolstered by more evidence than is usual in such cases. Women

standing in their cottage doors noticed him twice halt and stoop—once

to pick up a beetle which was laboriously crawling from ditch to

ditch, another time to pick up a swede dropped from some farm-cart.

He carefully put the beetle on the opposite bank—“Near squashed you,

my dear, I did. But He Who created the creeping things upon the

earth has preserved you from the boot of man.” The swede he dusted

and crammed in his pocket. It was known throughout the hamlets—the

“Streets” and “Greens”—of Dallington Parish that the minister was as

poor as he was unblushing about his poverty.

The evening was very still. Eddies and swells of golden, watery light

drifted over the hills round Dallington. In the north the sharp,

wooded hill where Brightling stood was like a golden cone, and the

kiln-shaped obelisk by Lobden’s House which marked the highest point

of South-east Sussex was also burnished to rare metal. The scent of

water, stagnant on fallen leaves, crept from the little woods where

the primroses and windflowers smothered old stumps in their pale

froth, or spattered with milky stars the young moss of the year. At

Woods Corner the smoke of a turf fire was rising from the inn, and

there was a smell of beer, too, as the minister passed the door,

and turned down the East Road towards Slivericks. The fire and the

beer both tempted him, for there was neither at the Horselunges, the

tumble-down old cottage where he lodged in Sunday Street. But the

former he looked on as an unmanly weakness, the latter as a snare of

the devil, so he swung on, humming a metrical psalm.

About a hundred yards below Woods Corner, just where the road, washed

stony by the rains, runs under the webbing of Slivericks oaks, he

turned into a field, across which a footpath led a pale stripe

towards Sunday Street. From the top of the field he could look down

over the whole sweep of country within the Four Roads, to the marshes

and the sea, or rather the saffron and purple mists where the marshes

and the sea lay together in enchantment. The yellow light wavered up

to him from the sunset, over the woods of Forges and Harebeating;

there was a sob of wind from Stilliands Tower, and a gleam of

half-hidden ponds in the spinneys by Puddledock. Mr. Sumption stood

still and listened.

The air was full of sunset sounds—the lowing of cows came up with

a mingled cuckoo’s cry, there was a tinkle of water behind him

in the ditch, and the soft swish of wind in the trees and in the

hedge, nodding ashes and sallows and oaks to and fro against the

light-filled sky. On the wind was a mutter and pulse, a throb which

seemed to be in it yet not of it, like the beating of a great heart,

strangely remote from all the gleam and softness of spring sunset,

pale fluttering cuckoo-flowers, and leaf-sweet pools of rain. A

blackbird called from the copse by Cowlease Farm, and his song was

as the voice of sunset and April and pooled rain ... still the great

distant heart throbbed on, its dim beats pulsing on the wind, aching

on the sunset, over the fields of peaceful England dropping asleep in

April.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption cracked his fingers loudly once or twice:

“You hear ’em pretty plain to-night ... the guns in France.”

He walked slowly on towards the stile, then stopped again and pulled

a letter out of his pocket. It was a dirty letter, written on cheap

note-paper with a smudged in indelible pencil.

“Dear Father,” it ran, “I reckon you’ll be wild when you get

this. I have left the Fackory and have enlisted in the R. Sussex

Regement. I could not stand that dirty tyke of Hubbard our forman

any more. So I’ve gone, for I’m sick of this, and there’s no fear

of my being fetched back, as I’m not satisfackory nor skilled in

particular, and should have been fetched out anyhow all in good

time, I reckon. So don’t go taking on about this, but please send

me some fags, and I should like some chockolate, and get some of

those kokernut buns at the shop with the crinkly paper round.

It is a week since I did it, but I have been to the Y.M.C.A.,

and bought some Cherry-blossom boot-pollish and a packet of

Players, and have no more money, and they said on a board ‘Write

home to-night.’ Well, dear Father, I hope you will not take this

too badly. Some good may come of it, for I am a soldier now and

going to fight the Germans. Good-bye and don’t forget to send the

things I said.

“Your loving son,

“JERRY.

“(467572 Pvte. Sumption, 9th Co. 18th Bn. R. Suss. Rejiment.)”

The minister crushed the letter back into the pocket already bulging

with the swede. “O Lord,” he groaned, “why doth it please Thee to

afflict Thy servant again? I reckon I’ve stood a lot on account

of that boy, and there seems no end to it. He’s the prodigal son

that never comes home, he’s the lost sheep that never gets into the

fold, and yet he’s my child and the woman from Ihornden’s....” His

mutterings died down, for he heard footsteps behind him.

A young man was crossing the field from Slivericks, a sturdy, stocky

fellow, about five-and-a-half feet high, with leggings and corduroy

riding-breeches, and a black coat which was a little too small for

him and as he drew near sent out an odour of moth-killer—evidently

some young farmer, unaccountably Sundified on a week-day evening.

“Hullo, Tom,” said the minister.

“Hullo, Mus’ Sumption.”

The boy stood aside for the older man to cross the stile. His head

hung a little over the unaccustomed stiffness of his collar, and his

eyes seemed full of rather painful thought. Mr. Sumption fumbled

in his pockets, drew out the letter, the swede, a pencil without

a point, a Testament, a squashed mass of chickweed, a tract, and

finally a broken-backed cigarette, which he handed to Tom.

“Bad news, I reckon?”

Tom nodded.

“They woan’t let me off. I wur afeard they wouldn’t. You see, there’s

faather and the boys left, and I couldn’t explain as how faather had

bad habits. You can’t bite back lik that on your own kin.”

“No, you can’t,” and Mr. Sumption carefully smoothed a dirty scrap

of paper as he put it back in his pocket. “By the way, my boy’s just

joined up. I heard from him this morning. He’s in the Eighteenth

Sussex—I shouldn’t wonder if you found yourselves together.”

“Lord, Mus’ Sumption! You doan’t tell me as he’s left the factory?”

“Reckon he has. Thought he’d like to fight for his King and country.

He was always a plucked ’un, and he couldn’t bear to see the lads

going to the front without him.”

There was a gleam in the minister’s eyes, and he cracked his fingers

loudly.

“I’m proud of him—I’m proud of my boy. He’s done a fine thing, for of

course he need never have gone. He’s been three years in munitions

now, and him only twenty. He went up to Erith when he was a mere lad,

no call for him to go, and now he’s joined up as a soldier when there

was no call for him to go, neither.”

Tom looked impressed.

“Maybe I ought to be feeling lik he does, but truth to tell it maakes

me heavy-hearted to be leaving the farm just now.”

“The Lord will provide.”

“I’m none so sure o’ that, wud faather and his habits, and the boys

so young and wild, and the girls wud their hearts in other things,

and mother, poor soul, so unsensible.”

“Well, what does the farm matter? Beware lest it become Naboth’s

vineyard unto you. Is this a time to buy cattle and vineyards and

olive-yards? This is the day which the Prophet said should burn like

an oven, and the proud, even the wicked, be as stubble. What’s your

wretched farm? Think of the farms round Ypers and Dixmood, think of

the farms round Rheims and Arrass—Stop!” and he seized Tom’s arm in

his hard, restless fingers—“Listen to those guns over in France.

Perhaps every thud you hear means the end of a little farm.”

Tom stood dejectedly beside him, the broken-backed cigarette, for

which the minister had unfortunately been unable to provide a light,

hanging drearily from his teeth. The soft mutter and thud pulsed

on. The sun was slowly foundering behind the woods of Bird-in-Eye,

sending up great shafts and spines of flowery light into the sky

which was now green as a meadow after rain.

“This war queers me,” he said, and his voice, low and thick as it

was, like any Sussex countryman’s, yet was enough to drown the

beating of that alien heart. “I doan’t understand it. I can’t git the

hang od it nohow.”

“A lot of it queers me,” said Mr. Sumption, “and I reckon that in

many ways we’re all as godless as the Hun. It’s not only the Germans

that shall burn like stubble—it’s us. The oven’s prepared for us as

well as for them.”

They were walking together down steep fields, the ground dreamy with

grey light, while before them, beyond the sea, burned the great oven

of the sunset, full of horns of flame.

“I’m thinking of the farm,” continued Tom, his mind sticking to

its first idea. “I’m willing enough to go and fight for the farms

in France and Belgium, but seems to me a Sussex farm’s worth two

furrin’ ones. Worge aun’t a fine place, but it’s done well since I

wur old enough to help faather—help him wud my head as well as my

arms, I mean. Faather’s an unaccountable clever chap—you should just

about hear him talk at the pub, and the books he’s read you’d never

believe. But he’s got ways wot aun’t good for farming, and he needs

somebody there to see as things doan’t slide when he can’t look after

them himself.”

“Can’t your brother Harry do anything? He must be nearly sixteen.”

“Harry’s unaccountable wild-like. He’s more lik to git us into

trouble than help us at all.”

“Maybe your father will pull-to a bit when you’re gone and he sees

things depend on him.”

“Maybe he will, and maybe he woan’t. But you doan’t understand, Mus’

Sumption. You doan’t know wot it feels like to be took away from

your work to help along a war as you didn’t ask for and don’t see

the hang of. Maybe you’d think different of the war if you had to

fight in it, but being a minister of religion you aun’t ever likely

to have to join up. I’m ready to go and do my share in putting chaps

into the oven, as you say, but it’s no use or sense your telling

me as it doan’t matter about the farm, for matter it does, and I’m

unaccountable vrothered wud it all.”

He grunted, and spat out the fag. Mr. Sumption, taking offence at

once, waved his arms like a black windmill.

“Ho! I don’t understand, don’t I? with my only son just gone for a

soldier. D’you think you care for your dirty farm more than I care

for my Jerry. D’you think I wouldn’t rather a hundred times go myself

than that he should go? O Lord, that this boy should mock me! You’ll

be safe enough, young Tom. You’ve only the Germans to fear, but my

lad has to fear his own countrymen too. The army was not made for

gipsy-women’s sons. My poor Jerry! ... there in the ranks like a colt

in harness. He’ll be sorry he’s done it to-morrow, and then they’ll

kill him.... Oh, hold your tongue, Tom Beatup! Here we are in Sunday

Street.”

Sunday Street was the lane that linked up Pont’s Green on the

East Road with Bucksteep Manor at Four Throws. From the southern

distance it looked like the street of a town, oddly flung across

the hill—a streak of red houses, with the squat steeples of oasts,

an illusion of shops and spires, crumbling on near approach into a

few tumble-down cottages and the oasts of Egypt Farm. From the north

you saw the chimneys first, high above the roofs like rabbits’ ears

above their heads; then you tumbled suddenly upon the hamlet: the

Bethel, the Horselunges, the shop, the inn whose sign was the Rifle

Volunteer, the forge, the pond, the two farms—Worge and Egypt—with

their cottages, and the farmstead of Little Worge sidling away

towards Pont’s Green.

To-night it was fogged in the grey smoke of its own wood fires, with

here and there on its windows the lemon green of the sky. It smelled

faintly of wood-smoke, sweet mud and standing rain, of rot in lathes

and tiles. The Horselunges, the cottage where the minister lodged,

was the first house in the village after the forge. It stood opposite

the Bethel, a brick, eighteenth-century building with big gaunt

windows staring blindly over the fields to Puddledock. The Bethel had

been built in Georgian days when the Particular Baptists flourished

in greater numbers round Sunday Street, and a saint of theirs had

built it to “the glory of God and in memory of my dear wife Susannah

Odlarne, saved by Grace. For Many are called but Few are chosen.”

Mr. Sumption and Tom had walked the last of their way in silence. But

the minister’s anger had fizzled out as quickly as it had kindled,

and at the door of the forge he held out his hand very kindly to the

boy.

“Well, good-night to you, lad. I must look in and see Bourner here

for a minute or two. I hope your mother won’t be much distressed at

your news.”

“Reckon she will, but it can’t be helped.... Funny, you doan’t hear

the guns down here.”

“No more you do, but they’re going it just the same—knocking away

little farms.”

Tom nodded with a wry smile and walked off. The minister turned into

the forge.

Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of

sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from

Galleybird or Harebeating, or even from the doors of sick people—if

they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son.

His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in

Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof-parings

and the ring of smitten iron. His sketchy education finished, he had

taken his place beside his father at the anvil—he had held the meek

tasselled hoofs of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows

that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment Day, he had

swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew

lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and

clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent.

But during his adolescence strange things had grown with his bulk and

girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the

roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching flames

he came to see the presage of that day which should burn like an

oven, the burning fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego,

through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the

Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s

judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment a

form of use. When the horse clumped out of the smithy with the new

iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of

God passed through fire into service.

He became “queer.” He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them

to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at

him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel

took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young

Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the

ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he

found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave

the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.

Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra

Sumption, comely, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in

a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect, and emerged

a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and

a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech.

He was a great disappointment to his benefactor, for the smith in

him had triumphantly survived all genteel training and theological

examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard

voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and

conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given

a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness, his “queerness” remained

as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel

at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity

of his forge-born similes, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate

and fume of the old Doomsday doctrines which were fast dying out of

Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform

to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped

his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It

was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself.

In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he

met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had

given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood,

where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her,

as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral

suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both

miserable for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They

returned to the forge at Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked

to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual

restless yearning of the Word within him, that drop of the divine

which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.

At the close of the year Meridian Sumption died at the birth of her

child. They had been ideally happy in their short married life, in

spite of the cage-bars of circumstances and the drivings of the Word

which divided them as in the beginning it had divided the waters from

the earth. After her death he became “queerer” than ever. He roamed

from village to village, preaching to farmers, gipsies, labourers,

tinkers, all who would hear him and some who would not—leaving his

child in his mother’s care.

Six years later the death of his father and mother made it necessary

that he should take the boy—named grotesquely Jeremiah Meridian, as

if to show his double origin in religion and vagabondage. At the

same time his first patron, the minister of Bethersden, offered to

recommend him for the pastorate of the Particular Baptist Chapel at

Sunday Street near Dallington. His conscience had long grieved over

the vagaries of his blacksmith saint, and in this empty pastorate he

saw a way of settling both. Sumption had acquired a certain fame as

a preacher among the ’dens of Kent, candidates for the Particular

Ministry were not so many as they used to be, and the pastorate of

Sunday Street, with its dwindling, bumpkin congregation, country

loneliness, and small revenues, was hard to fill. After various

difficulties, the new minister arrived with his black-eyed, swarthy

child. He had grown tired of his wanderings, and had conceived an

erratic, arbitrary affection for this pledge of gipsy love. He looked

forward to a settled country life and to preaching the Word in his

own Bethel.

The villagers, for the most part, liked him. His manners offended

them, and as they were mostly Church-people they seldom came to his

chapel except on wet Sundays, when it meant too much dirt and trouble

to go to hear old Mr. Foxe at Dallington or young Mr. Poullett-Smith

at Brownbread Street. But from the first he was as one of themselves,

treated with no respect and much kindness. He was seldom invited to

sick-beds or to officiate at funerals or marriages, but he never

lacked an invitation to a Harvest Supper or Farmers’ Club Dinner. For

his sake the neighbourhood tolerated the villainies of his Jerry, a

throw-back to the poaching, roving, thieving Rossarmescroes. None

the less, they were glad when at the outbreak of war he went to work

in a munition factory, first in London, then, through a series of

not very creditable wanderings, to Erith. Only the minister grieved,

for he loved Jerry as he had loved no human thing since his mother

died in the little apple-smelling room above the smithy. He was not

always kind to the boy, and the arm which had wielded the hammer

so lustily had on one or two shocking occasions nearly broken the

bones he loved. But he had for his son a half-spiritual, half-animal

affection, and the villagers pitied him when the boy went, though

they were glad to see him go.

“Mus’ Sumption wur more blacksmith nor he wur minister,” they said

when any local enthusiasm for him prevailed; and it was true that in

his loneliness and anxiety he would often find comfort in the forge

at Sunday Street, where he could sit and watch Bourner the smith

swing his hammer, or even sometimes himself, with coat thrown off and

shirt-sleeves rolled back over arms long and hairy as a gorilla’s,

smite the hot iron or scrape the patient hoof, while his face grew

red as copper in the firelight and the sweat ran over it and his

shaggy chest.

To-night, when Jerry had wounded him afresh, he turned to his

unfailing refuge. His pain was not the mere dread of death or

maiming of the lad—it was something more sinister, more intangible.

“The army is not for the gipsy woman’s son.” He feared for Jerry in

that organised system of rank and order and command. He would have

preferred him in the workshop even if the relative danger of the two

places had been reversed. Jerry was less likely to be smashed by a

German shell than by the system in which he had enrolled himself.

He would break his head against its discipline, hang himself in its

rules.... His dread for Jerry under martial law was the dread his

Meridian’s ancestors would have felt for her under a roof. It was a

fear based more on instinct than on reason, therefore all the more

bruising to the instinctive passion of fatherhood. It was well that

he had this refuge of iron and anvil, of hammer and hoof, this small

comforting similitude of the day which should burn as an oven....

Bourner the smith did not talk to him much. He made a few technical

remarks, and winked at his mate when Mr. Sumption boasted of Jerry’s

valour in joining the army. But gradually the tired, careworn look

on the minister’s face died away, his eyes ceased to smoulder and

roll; in the thick stuffy atmosphere, strong with the smell of hoofs

and the ammoniacal smell of hide and horses, grey with smoke and

noisy with the roar of flames and the ring of iron, he was going

back in peace to his father’s house, to the smithy at the throws by

Bethersden, before the burdens of divine and human love had come down

upon him.

After his companion had left him, Tom Beatup walked quickly down the

lane, past the Horselunges and the Rifle Volunteer, to where Worge

gate hung crooked across Worge drive, paintless and smeared with dew.

Here he stopped a minute, and looked at the huddle of the farm. It

was one black shape against the yellow of the sky, and the cones of

its oasts and the spires of its poplars seemed part of its block, so

that it looked grotesque and horned. He hesitated, rubbed his hand

along the top of the gate and licked the dew off his fingers, then

turned and walked eastward.

Beyond Egypt Farm and the cottages of Worge, just before the willow

pond that marked the end of the street, stood the shop, where Thyrza

Honey was “licensed to sell tobacco.” It was in darkness now, except

for a faint creep of light under the door. Had Thyrza “shut up”?

No—the handle turned, the little bell gave its buzzing ring, and the

warm light ran out for a moment into the darkling lane—with a smell

of tea and tobacco, sweets and sawdust, scrubbed floor and rotting

beams, the smell that was to Tom the same refuge as the smell of the

forge was to Mr. Sumption.

The shop was empty, but he could see a shadow moving to and fro

across the little window at the back—a ridiculous little window,

about a foot square, yet as gay with its lace curtains and pink

ribbons as the drawing-room bow of a Brighton lodging-house. The next

minute a face was pressed against it, then withdrawn, and the door at

the back of the shop opened.

“Good evenun, Mus’ Tom.”

“Good evenun, Mrs. Honey.”

She moved slowly to her place behind the counter. All her movements

were slow, which women sometimes found irritating, but never men,

who were always either consciously or unconsciously aware of a kind

of drawling beauty in her gait. She was fair, with hair like fluffy,

sun-bleached grass. Her skin was like that of an apricot, soft and

thick, of a deep creamy yellow, with soft dabs of colour on her wide

cheek-bones.

“A packet of woodbines, please,” said Tom.

She reached them from the shelf behind her.

“Have you got any bull’s-eyes?”

“Yes—three-ha’pence an ounce.”

“They’ve got dearer.”

“And they’ll get dearer still, I reckon.”

“Give me three penn’orth, please.”

She took them out of a glass bottle at her elbow.

“Got any monster telephones?”

“I dunno—I’m afeard we’re sold out.”

Thyrza always spoke of herself in a business capacity as “we.”

“Could you maake up two penn’orth? Harry and Zacky are unaccountable

fond of them.”

“You’re a kind brother—buying sweeties for all the family. I reckon

the bull’s-eyes are fur your sisters.”

“Reckon they are. No use giving monster telephones to girls—they

can’t be eaten dentical.”

This was obvious when Thyrza finally unearthed the telephones in an

old case under the ginger-beer box. They were long, black coiling

strings of liquorice, requiring sleight of hand, combined with a

certain amount of unfastidiousness, for their consumption. Tom was

disappointed that Thyrza had found them so soon. He stood by the

counter, fingering his purchases and wishing his money was not all

gone.

“I hear you’ve bin up at the Tribunal,” said Thyrza, coming to the

rescue.

“Yes—they woan’t let me off.”

“You’re sorry, I reckon.”

“Unaccountable. I doan’t know wot ull become of the farm.”

Thyrza sighed sympathetically, having nothing to say in the way of

comfort.

“They said as how I wurn’t really indispensable, faather being

able-bodied and having two lads besides me, and two ‘hands’”—he

laughed bitterly. “I’d like to show ’em the ‘hands’—two scarecrows,

you might say.”

“It’s a sad world,” remarked Thyrza comfortably.

Mrs. Honey was a widow, but never had more than a sentimental sigh

for her husband who had made her miserable, and then suddenly rather

proud—on that last day of October when the Royal Sussex had held the

road to Sussex against the fury of the Prussian Guard, and Sam Honey

died to save the home he had made so unhappy while he lived. He had

died bravely and she was proud of him, but he had lived meanly and

she could not regret him.

“Wot sort of a soldier d’you think I’ll make, Mrs. Honey?”

“A good one, surelye”—and she showed him teeth like curd.

“I’m naun so sure, though. I’m a farmer bred, and the life ull be

middling strange to me.”

“Maybe you’ll lik it. Sam liked it fine. There was no end o’ fun to

be had, he said, and foakes all giving you chocolate and woodbines,

just as if you wur the king.”

“Will you send me a postcard now and agaun, Mrs. Honey?”

“Reckon I will.”

There was silence for a minute or two in the shop. The oil lamp

swung, moving the shadows over the ceiling where the beams sagged

with the weight of Thyrza’s little bedroom. A clock in the back room

ticked loudly. Tom was still leaning across the counter, looking

at Thyrza. They both felt rather awkward, as they often felt in

each other’s company. Thyrza wondered when Tom was going. She

liked him—liked him unaccountable—but her bit of supper was on the

fire in the next room, there was some mending to be done, and many

other odds and ends of feminine business before it was time to set

the mouse-traps, put the milk-jug on the doorstep, and go to bed.

Besides, she knew he ought to be going back to Worge to tell his

family the news which should have been theirs before he brought it to

her.

“I reckon your mother ull be wondering how you’ve fared this

afternoon. Has your father gone home and told her?”

“I left faather at Woods Corner.”

“She’ll be worriting about him too, then.”

“Maybe I should ought to go home and tell them.”

He straightened himself with a sigh. He must leave his refuge of tea

and soap and candles, the peace of Thyrza Honey’s slow movements and

thick, sweet voice. She was sorry for him.

“You’ll look in again, Mus’ Tom?”

“Surelye.”

“Maybe you’ll bring your sister Ivy round for a cup of tea before you

go. Ull you be going soon?”

“In a fortnight.... Good evenun, Mrs. Honey.”

“Good evenun, Mus’ Tom.”

Again the bell gave its buzzing ring, as he opened the door and went

out.

Tom’s heart had sunk rather low before he came to Worge. He was

always dissatisfied with himself after seeing Thryza. He never seemed

able to find anything to say, just because she was the person he

liked most in the world to talk to. He felt that he must be very

different from the other men who came to see her—for men liked

Thyrza—who could make even the buying of a penn’orth of sweets an

occasion for artful sally and interesting conversation. That reminded

him that he had left all his purchases on the counter. What an

unaccountable fool he was! However, he would not go back for them.

They must wait till to-morrow. Still, he wished he hadn’t left them.

Thyrza would think him silly, and besides he had wanted to give those

sweets to his brothers and sisters. He nearly always brought them

something when he went into the town.

They were all at supper in the kitchen—he could hear their voices. He

wondered if his father had come back yet. He had not, for the first

question that greeted his entrance was:

“Whur’s your faather, Tom?”

“I left him at Woods Corner. I’d have thought he’d bin home by now.”

“Then you thought silly. ’T’aun’t likely as he’ll come home till they

close. You should have stopped along of un.”

“I thought I’d better git back home and tell you the news.”

“And wot’s that? Have they let you off?”

“Not they. A fortnight’s final.”

Mrs. Beatup began to cry. She was a large, stout woman with masses of

rough grey hair, and a broad, rather childish face, which now looked

more like a child’s than ever as it wrinkled up for crying.

“Now, mother, doan’t you taake on,” said Ivy, the eldest girl,

getting up and putting her arm round her.

“It’s a shaame, a hemmed shaame,” sobbed the woman. “No woander as

faather’s stopped at Woods Corner. To take our eldest boy as is the

prop and stay of the whole of us!”

“He aun’t no such thing,” said Ivy, who was a strapping girl—rather

like her mother, except that her round face ended in a sharp chin,

which gave her an unexpected air of shrewdness. The second girl,

Nell, was helping her brother to his supper of pork and cabbage.

“No one can say he’s indispensable,” she remarked in rather a pretty,

half-educated voice—she was pupil teacher in her second year at the

school in Brownbread Street. “There’s Harry just on sixteen, and

there’s Juglery and Elphick, and no one can say father isn’t a strong

man and able to look after the farm.”

“Your faather’s no use. Tom, did you tell them as your faather had

bad habits?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Tom sulkily, shovelling in the cabbage with his

knife.

“Then you wur a fool. You know as your faather aun’t himself three

nights out of five, and yet you go and say naun about it. How are

they to know if you doan’t tell them?”

“I wurn’t going to tell all the big folk round Senlac as my faather

drinks.”

“Hush, Tom! I never said as you wur to say that—but you might have

let ’em know, careful like, as he aun’t always able to look after the

farm as well as you might think.”

“It ud have done no good. Drunkenness aun’t a reason for exemption,

as they say. Besides, I’d middling little to do in the matter.

Faather was applying fur me, and he did all the talking—an

unaccountable lot of it, too. I wurn’t took because there wurn’t

enough said against it, I promise you. But seemingly before a farm

chap like me gits off, he’s got to have a certifickit from the War

Agricultural Committee, and they read a letter saying as they’d

recommended one to be given, but the Executive Committee or summat

hadn’t fallen in wud it. So there’s no use crying, mother, for go I

must, and it’ll be none the easier for you making all this vrother.”

He was cross because he was unhappy.

“Will you be in the Royal Sussex, Tom—along of Mus’ Dixon and Mus’

Archie?” asked Zacky, the youngest boy.

“I dunno.”

“When ull you be leaving?”

“In a fortnight, I’ve told you.”

“I hear as how Bill Putland ull be going soon,” said Mrs. Beatup.

“He’d be company like fur you, Tom.”

“Bill!—he’s too unaccountable fine and grand fur me. He thinks no end

of himself being Mus’ Lamb’s chuvver. But I’ll tell you who’s joined

the Sussex, though, and that’s Jerry Sumption. I met Mus’ Sumption,

this evenun, and he toald me.”

“You doan’t mean to say as Jerry’s left the fackory?”

“Yes. He went and enlisted—minister says he’s unaccountable proud of

him.”

There was a crackle of laughter round the table.

“Well, we all of us know, and I reckon minister knows as we

know, that if Jerry had bin any sort of use at the munititions

they wouldn’t have let him join up. It’s a law that if you maake

munititions you doan’t have to join up.”

“Oh, Jerry’s bin never no good at naun. He’s jest a roving gipsy dog.”

Mrs. Beatup turned suddenly to Ivy:

“Did you know aught of this?”

“Not I!” said Ivy carelessly. “Jerry hasn’t written to me fur more’n

a month. Maybe this is why.”

“I’m justabout sorry fur Mus’ Sumption,” said Tom, whom his supper

had put in better humour. “He has a feeling as Jerry ull come to no

good in the army.”

“No more he will, nor nowhere, I’m thinking,” said Mrs. Beatup.

“Doan’t you never have naun to do wud him, Tom. I doan’t want my

children to git the splash of that gipsy muck——” And she threw

another half-defiant, half-furtive look at Ivy.

“Where’s Harry?” asked Tom.

“Out ratting,” Zacky informed him.

“Well, he woan’t find any supper’s bin kept fur him, that’s all,”

said Mrs. Beatup, rising and pushing back her chair. “Nell, put the

plaates on the tray and maake yourself useful fur wunst.”

A flush crept over Nell’s pale, pretty face, from her neck to the

roots of her reddish hair. She gingerly picked up two of the smelly,

greasy plates, then quickly put them down again.

“There’s faather.”

“Where?” Mrs. Beatup listened.

“I heard the gate—and there goes the side door.”

The next minute a heavy, uncertain footstep was heard in the passage,

then a bump as if someone had lurched into the wall. The family stood

stock-still and waited.

“Maybe he’ll hurt himself in the dark,” said Mrs. Beatup, “now

policeman woan’t let us have the light at the passage bend.”

“No, he’s all right. There he is scrabbling at the door.”

There was the sound of fingers groping and scratching. Then the door

opened and the farmer of Worge came in, his hat a little on one side,

a lock of hair falling over his red forehead, and the whole of his

waistcoat undone. He stood, supporting himself against the doorpost,

and glared at the family.

“Your supper’s still hot, Ned,” said Mrs. Beatup

hesitatingly—“leastways, the gals have eaten all the taters, but I

can hot you up....” She began to whimper as the bleared grey eyes

slowly rolled towards her.

“Be quiet, Mother,” said Ivy.

Mus’ Beatup, slowly and carefully, made his way towards a

broken-springed armchair beside the fire. He then sat down by the

simple process of falling into it backwards; then he stretched out a

foot that seemed made of clay and manure——

“Taake off my boots, Missus.”

It was quite dark before Tom was able to slip out to see to one or

two odd jobs that wanted doing in the barns. He felt himself obliged

to stay in the kitchen while his father was there, for though there

had not been more than a few occasions when surliness had blazed into

assault, he knew that it was always just possible that his father

might become violent, especially as his mother always went the worst

way—with tears, reproaches, arguments and lamentations. What would

happen when he was no longer at hand to watch over her he did not

like to think. It was all part of the load of anxiety and love which

was settling down on him.

If he had been a free man he would probably have felt quite ready

for the change ahead of him. Though his imagination had scarcely

taken hold of the war, and though the harrow and the plough, with the

thick sucking earth on his boots, and the drip of rain or stew of

sunshine on waiting fields, had absorbed most of the boyish spirit

of adventure which might have sent him questing out of stuffier

circumstances—though his was the country heart, which is the last

heart for warfare—in spite of all, he might have gone gaily to the

new life, with its wider reach and freedom, if he had not known that

his departure meant the crumbling of that little corner of England

which was his, which his arm had built and his back supported.

He knew that Worge leaned on him, for he felt the weight of it even

in his dreams. It was four years now since he had put his shoulder

against it; he was only just twenty, but he knew that if four years

ago he had not made up his mind to save the farm, his father would

have drunk, and the rest of the family muddled, the place into the

auction market, and the Beatups would now be scattered into towns

or soaking their humble-pie in beer on smallholdings. He had done

nothing very wonderful. The place was small and no more wanted a

giant to hold it up than a giant to knock it down. He had merely

worked while others slacked, thought while others slept, remembered

while others forgot. But, without any thrill of pride or adventure,

he knew that he had tided Worge through its bad hour, and that the

same little upheld it now. He was the real farmer, though he had

to be careful not to let his headship be seen. His father had not

explained things clearly to the tribunal—explaining things clearly

was not a quality of Tom’s either—he had been far too anxious to

preserve his own importance, which might have suffered had he said,

“My son runs the farm while I’m drinking at the pub.”

The others were not even as much good as his father. In the

intervals of drinking, which in spite of Mrs. Beatup’s three-in-five

calculation were often quite respectable, he was both hard-working

and resourceful, though of late his brain had grown spongier and

threatened a final rot. But the rest of the family had no upstanding

moments. Ivy was strong and comparatively willing, but Tom did not

believe in girls as farm-hands and never thought of Ivy even milking

the cows. She and her mother looked after the chickens and did the

housework, that was all. Nell was out all day and busy working in the

evenings for her examination; Zacky was still at school, and Harry

was a rover—the comrade of other farmers’ younger sons in ratting and

sparrow-hunting, in visiting fairs, in trespassing for birds’ eggs,

or sometimes solitary in strange obedience to the call of distant

wood or village green. Yet Harry was Tom’s one hope—a last, forlorn

one.

Tom was waiting for him now. He wanted to speak to his young brother

alone, not in the dim lath-smelling bedroom where Zacky would be

a third. Harry did not generally stop out late, though he had

occasionally roamed all night—hunger and fear of a beating (another

of Tom’s quasi-paternal tasks) usually brought him home just in time

to satisfy one and escape the other.

Tom looked into the cowshed—one of the cows had shown ailing signs

that day, but she seemed well enough now, with her large head lolling

against the stall, her eyes soft and untroubled in the brown glow of

his lantern. He would not see the calf which had caused him so much

half-proud anxiety; he wondered what would become of them both if it

should be born on one of Father’s “bad nights.” Then he went into the

stable, where the three farm-horses—the sorrel, the brown, and the

bay—stood stamping and chumbling, with the cold miasmic air like a

mist above the straw. Then he went back into the yard—saw that the

hen-house door was fast, that old Nimrod the watch-dog had his bone

and his water and a good length of chain. It was very cold, there

was a faint smell of rime on the motionless air, and the stars were

like spluttering candles in the frost-black sky. These April days

and nights were unaccountable tricky, he told himself. That noon the

very heart of the manure-heap had melted in the sun, and now it was

hardening again—his boot hardly sank into the stuff as he trod it

with his heel. Some of it ought to be carted to-morrow and put round

the apple-trees....

Harry was very late. He would go into the corn-chamber and do some

accounts. He was clumsy with his figures, and they kept him there

twisting and scratching his head till nearly ten o’clock, when he

heard a footfall, would-be stealthy, on the stones.

He rose quickly and ran round the yard to the backdoor just as a

shadow melted up against it.

“Here—you!” cried Tom surlily, for he was tired and muddled with

his sums—“doan’t you think to go slithering in quiet lik that, you

good-fur-naun.”

“I’ll come in when I like,” grumbled Harry. “You aun’t maaster here.”

“Well, I’m the bigger chap, anyways, so mind your manners. Where’ve

you bin?”

“Only down to Puddledock.”

“Puddledock aun’t sich a valiant plaace as you shud spend half a day

there. You’ve bin up to no good, I reckon. A fine chap you’ll be to

mind Worge when I’m gone.”

“You’re going, then?”

Harry’s voice was anxious, for he was fond of Tom, though he resented

his interference with his liberties.

“Yes—I’m going ... join up in a fortnight. Come in, Harry; I want to

spik to you.”

“I want my supper.”

“You’ll have your supper, though you doan’t desarve it, you

spannelling beggar. I’ll come and sit along of you; we must talk

business, you and I.”

“About Worge?”

“Yes.”

They were in the kitchen now, dark except for some gleeds of fire.

The rest of the family had gone to bed, but the broken supper was

still on the table—the hacked, hardening loaf, and the remains of

the bacon and cabbage under floating scabs of grease. Tom lit the

lamp and Harry sat down, hungry and uncritical. The two boys were

curiously alike, short and sturdy, with broad sunburnt faces, grey

eyes, big mouths, and small, defiant noses. Harry’s coat was covered

with clay all down one side, and the sleeve was torn—Tom was too

heavy-hearted for more scolding, just noted drearily a new item of

expenditure. The younger brother saw the elder’s cast-down looks:

“I’m unaccountable sorry, Tom,” he said sheepishly.

“Cos of wot? Cos I’m going or cos you aun’t worth your bed and keep?”

“Cos of both.”

“Well, there’s naun to do about one, but a sight to do about t’other.

Harry, you’ll have to mind Worge when I’m agone.”

“Wot can I do?”

“You can work instead of roaming, and you can see to things

when faather’s bad—see as there aun’t naun foolish done or jobs

disremembered. Elphick and Juglery have only half a head between

them. Before I go I’ll tell you all I’ve had in my head about the hay

in Bucksteep field, and the oats agaunst the Street and them fuggles

down by the Sunk. And you’ll have to kip it all in your head saum

as I’ve kipped it in mine, and see as things come out straight by

harvest. D’you understand?”

“Yes, Tom.”

“And there’s Maudie’s calf due next month, and a brood of them

Orpingtons, and I’d meant to buy a boar at Lewes Fair and kip him

for service. You’ll never have the sense to do it. You mun stop

your ratting and your roving, or Worge ull be at the auctioneer’s.

Faather’s a valiant clever chap when he’s sober, and book-larned too,

but the men are two old turnup-heads, and Zacky’s scarce more’n a

child, and the gals are gals—so it’s up to you, Harry, as they say,

to kip the plaace going.”

Harry groaned——

“Why wudn’t they let you stay?”

“Because they didn’t see no sense in kipping an a man on farm-work

when there wur plenty about to do his job. They doan’t understand

how things are, and when you coame to think of it, it’s a shaum as I

can’t go wud a free heart.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I dunno. I aun’t got the chance of knowing, wud all this vrothering

me. But I’d go easier if I cud think the plaace wouldn’t fall to

pieces as soon as I left it, and that if I’m killed....”

He stopped. Strangely enough, he had never thought of being killed

till now.

Tom’s calling-up papers did not arrive till a few days later. It was

a showery morning, with a flooding blue sky, smeethed and streaked

with low floats of cloud. The rain was cracking on the little green

panes of the kitchen window, and the spatter of the drops, with

the soft humming song of the kitchen fire, was in Tom’s ears as he

studied the sheet which entitled one horse, one bicycle, one mule,

one (asterisked) private soldier to travel cost-free to Lewes. He

opened his mouth to say, “My calling-up papers have come,” but said

nothing, just sat with his mouth open. The shower rattled and the

fire hummed, then a sudden spill of sunshine came from the dripping

edge of a cloud into the room, making the drops on the pane like

golden beads, and lighting up the breakfast table, so that the

mangled loaf and the dirty cups became almost as wonderful as the

shining faces round them.

Mus’ Beatup was himself this morning—they still called it “himself,”

though of late his real self had seemed more and more removed from

the lusty headacheless man who sat among them to-day, more and more

closely coiled with that abject thing of sickness and violence which

came lurching down the fields at dusk from the Rifle Volunteer. He

was studying his share of the post—an invitation to an auction at

Rushlake Green, where Galleybird Farm was up for sale with all its

live and dead stock. Mrs. Beatup had never had a letter in her life,

nor apparently wanted one. She always exclaimed at the post, and

wondered why Ivy should have all those postcards. In her young days

no one sent postcards to girls. If a chap wanted you for wife he hung

around the gate, if he did not want you for wife he took no manner

of notice of you. A dozen chaps could not want Ivy for wife—her with

as many freckles as a foxglove, and all blowsy too, and sunburnt as

a stack—and yet there were nearly a dozen postcards strewn round her

plate this morning. Some were field postcards, whizz-bangs, from

Sussex chaps in France, some were stamped with the red triangle of

the Y.M.C.A., some were views of furrin Midland places where Sussex

chaps were in training, and some were funny ones that made Ivy

throw herself back in her chair, and show her big, white, friendly

teeth, and laugh “Ha! ha!” till the others said, “Let’s see, Ivy,”

and the picture of the Soldier come home on leave to find twins, or

the donkey chewing the Highlander’s kilt, or the Kaiser hiding in a

barrel from “_Ach Gott! die_ Royal Sussex!” would be passed round the

table. To-day one of the pictures of the gentleman with twins—it was

a popular one in the Sussex, and Ivy had two this morning—was from

Jerry Sumption.

“Says he’s fed up,” said Ivy. “He reckons I knew about his joining.

How was I to know? He’s at Waterheel Camp; and he’s met Sid Viner and

young Kadwell. They kip those boys far enough from home.”

“And a good thing too,” said Mrs. Beatup. “We doan’t want Minister’s

gipsy spannelling round.”

“Spik for yourself, mother—there aun’t a lad at Waterheel as I

wuldn’t have here if I cud git him.”

“You’ll come to no good,” grumbled her father, and pretty Nell, with

her anæmic flush, shrugged away from her sister’s sprawling elbow.

She herself had had only one postcard, which she slipped hastily into

the front of her blouse—unlike Ivy, who left hers scattered over the

table even when the family had risen from their meal. There was not

much in the postcard to justify such preferential treatment, for it

ran—“There will be a meeting of the Sunday-school teachers to-morrow

in church at 5.30. H. Poullett-Smith.”

Nell began to collect her books for school. She carefully dusted

the crumbs from her skirt, smoothed her pretty marigold hair before

the bit of mirror by the fireplace, put on her hat and jacket, and

was gone. The rest of the family began to disperse. Zacky had to go

to school too, but his going was an unwilling, complicated matter

compared with Nell’s. His mother had to find his cap, his sister

to mend his bootlace, his father to cuff his head, and finally his

brother Tom to set him marching with a kick in his rear.

Ivy tied on a sacking apron and began to slop soapsuds on the floor

of the outer kitchen, Mrs. Beatup set out on a quest—which experience

told would last the morning—after a plate of potatoes she could have

sworn she had set in the larder overnight. Mus’ Beatup went off to

his fields with Harry at his tail, and calling to Tom—

“Have you bin over to Egypt about them roots?”

“No—I’m going this mornun.”

“Then you can tell Putland as it’s taake or leave—he pays my price or

he doan’t have my wurzels.”

“Yes, Father.”

Tom went off very quietly, fingering the summons in his pocket. How

many times now would he go on these errands to Egypt, Cowlease,

Slivericks and other farms? His father would have to go, or if unfit,

then Harry would be sent—Harry who would sell you a cart of swedes

for tuppence or exchange a prize pig for a ferret. That was an

unaccountable queer little bit of paper in his pocket. He could tear

it in two, but it could also do the same for him, and in any conflict

it must come out winner. It was, as it were, a finger of that

invisible hand which was being thrust down through the clouds to grab

Tom and other little people. The huge, unseen, unlimited, unmerciful

force of a kingdom’s power lay behind it, and Tom’s single body and

soul must obey without hope of escape the great Manhood that demanded

them both, as a potter demands clay and scoops up the helpless earth

to bake in his oven....

All this in a more or less rag-and-tag state was passing through

his mind as he walked down the drive of Worge, with Speedwell

a-bloom between the ruts, and came to the Inn whose painted sign

was a volunteer of Queen Victoria’s day. It was an old house, with

a huge windward sprawl of roof, but had not been licensed more than

sixty years. Tom disliked it as a temptation which Providence had

tactlessly dumped at their door. If Mus’ Beatup had had to walk to

the Crown at Woods Corner or the George at Brownbread Street he would

have been more continuously the smart, upstanding man he was this

morning.

Egypt Farm was just across the road. It was smaller than Worge, but

also brighter and more prosperous-looking. There was new white paint

round the windows and on the cowls of the oasts, and the little patch

of garden by the door was trim, with hyacinths a-blowing and early

roses spotting the trellis with their first buds.

“Mornun, Tom,” called Mrs. Putland cheerily. She was putting a suet

pudding into the oven, with the kitchen door wide open, and saw him

as he crossed the yard.

“Mornun, ma’am. Is the maaster at home?”

“Maaster’s over at Satanstown buying a calf. Can I give him your

message?”

“Faather says as it’s taake it or leave it about them roots.”

“Then I reckon he’ll taake it. He never wur the man to higgle-haggle,

and the roots is good roots.”

“Justabout valiant—I never got a tidier crop out of Podder’s field.”

Mrs. Putland had come to the door and stood looking at him, with her

arms akimbo. She was a small, trim woman, buttoned and sleeked, and

somehow the expression of her face was the same as the expression

of the house—the clean, kindly, enquiring look of Egypt with its

white-framed staring windows and smooth, ruddy tiles.

“It’ll be unaccountable sad fur your faather to lose you. You’ve bin

the prop-stick of Worge this five year.”

“Can’t be helped. I’ve got to go. Had my calling-up paapers this

mornun.”

“That’s queer. So did Bill. Reckon you’ll go together.”

“Didn’t Bill try fur exemption, then?”

“No—Mus’ Lamb wouldn’t have it. Besides, there wurn’t no reason as he

should stay. We’ve done wudout him here since he went to the Manor,

and Mus’ Lamb ull kip his plaace fur him till he comes back.”

Tom envied Bill his free heart.

“I’ll give him a call,” continued Bill’s mother. “He aun’t due up at

the Manor fur an hour yit, and he wur saying only last night as he

never sees you now.”

A few minutes later Bill answered his mother’s call, and sauntered

round the corner of the house, his hands in his pockets, his

chauffeur’s cap a little on one side. He had a handsome,

fresh-coloured face, strangely cheeky for a country boy’s, and Tom

always felt rather ill at ease in his presence, a little awed by the

fact that though his hands might sometimes be brown and greasy with

motor-oil, his body was of a well-washed whiteness unknown at Worge.

“Hullo, Bill.”

“Hullo, Tom.”

There had never been a very deep friendship between them; Bill was

inclined to be patronising, and Tom both to resent it and to envy

him. But to-day a new, mysterious bond was linking them. In the

pocket of Bill’s neat livery there was a paper exactly like that in

Tom’s manure-slopped corduroys.

“I hear you’ve bin called up, Bill.”

“Yes—in a fortnight, they say.”

“I’m going too—in a fortnight.”

“Pleased?”

“No. I’m unaccountable vrothered at leaving the farm. Wot d’you feel

about it?”

“Oh, me?—I’m not sorry. They’ll keep my place open for me at the

Manor, and I shall like getting a hit at Kayser Bill. Besides, the

gals think twice as much of you if you’re in uniform.”

This was a new complexion on the case, and Tom’s thoughts wandered

down to the shop.

“I shall like being along of Mus’ Archie, too—he told me I could be

along of him. We’re all eighteenth Sussex hereabouts. I reckon you’ll

be in with us.”

“I dunno.”

Tom’s brows were crinkled, for he was thinking hard. He was chewing

the fact that for a free man there might be something rather pleasant

in soldiering. This happy, conceited, self-confident little chauffeur

was teaching him that the soldier’s lot was not entirely dark.

“Called up”—“taken”—“fetched along”—those were the words of his

conscript’s vocabulary. But now for the first time he saw something

beyond them, a voluntary endeavour beyond the conscript’s obedience,

a corporate enthusiasm beyond his lonely unwillingness. “We’re all

eighteenth Sussex hereabouts....”

April was May before Tom’s weeks of grace had run. The field hollows

were white with drifts of hawthorn, and the pale purplish haze of the

cuckoo-flower had given place to the buttercups’ dabble of gold. The

papery-white of the wild cherry had gone from the woods, which were

green now, thick, and full of the nutty smell of leaves. The ditches

were milky with fennel, and on the high meadows by Thunders Hill the

broom and the gorse clumped their yellows together, making the hill a

flaming cone to those who saw it from the marshes of Horse Eye.

The farmers of Dallington watched their hayfields rust. There was

little corn in that country bounded by the Four Roads, so as the sun

climbed higher noon by noon, the neighbourhood grew gipsy-brown—the

straw-coloured feathers of the grass veiled a glowing heart of

clover, and above them opened the white ox-eyes and pools of

sorrel....

Tom Beatup watched ripen the fields whose harvest he would not see.

There were some twenty acres of hay at Worge, and two fields in which

the green corn was his hope and dread. The crop was promising on the

whole—a bit sedge-leaved perhaps, but firm in its seed. There were

the hops, too, in the low fields by Puddledock, where Forges Wood

shut off the north-east wind. He trundled the insect-sprayer round

the bines, and afterwards loved the smell of his green, sticky hands.

He would have been rightly offended if anyone had told him that his

chief pangs of parting were for the farm. None the less, there was

a lingering wistfulness in his last dealings with it which was not

in his intercourse with his family. He loved his mother, he admired

his father, he felt for his brothers and sisters an elder brother’s

half-anxious, half-contemptuous fondness; but in his last services

for Worge, whether in field or barn, there was something almost

sacramental. His duties were rites—he was the unconscious priest of

that tumble-down altar before which the manure smoked as incense and

on which the burnt-offering of his boyhood lay.

He had, too, a hunger for the fields, not only the fields of Worge,

but for all those within the Four Roads—which he did not see as

roads leading to adventure, but as boundaries fencing home. When his

tasks allowed he would roam in the webbing of tracks that the farms

have spun between the lanes—he would go to Starnash or Oxbottom

Town, watch the lightless sky grow purple over Muddles Green, and

the big stars begin to spark it as the moon hung like a red lamp

above Mystole Wood. High on the zenith the sky would be rainy green,

and he would watch it deepen to purple round the crimson moon, all

unconscious of its beauty, loving it only because it hung above

this clay in which his feet were stuck, because from it came the

brightness which waked the homely things he had put in the earth to

sleep....

Sometimes he would be disturbed by another quest, and would beat

slowly up and down on the road outside the shop, longing to go in

and yet strangely reluctant. He felt all tied-up and dumb. He could

not tell Thyrza Honey what he felt at leaving her any more than

he could have told Starnash or Thunders Hill—than he could have

told the little brother who lay against him on cold nights—or the

dreamy-eyed cows he milked—or even the grinning, whining watch-dog

who muddied him with his love. He was dumb, as all these were dumb.

He felt unaccountable vrothered at having to leave them all, and that

was the utmost he could say; and yet he knew that in Thyrza’s case,

at any rate, it was not enough. A man with a better tongue than he

would have gone into that shop, and shut himself into the light and

tea-smelling warmth, instead of pacing up and down under the cold

stars.

On the last day of all he plucked up courage. He could not go without

saying good-bye, and he had always brought her the big things of his

life—from his buying of a horse-rake to the news of the Tribunal’s

decision—though each time he had wrapped his need in some penny

purchase of tobacco or sweets.

The little bell buzzed and ting’d. The shop was empty and rather

dark, for a grey starless dusk was on the fields after a rainy day.

The wind rattled the door he had shut behind him, and moaned round

the little leaded window banked up with penny toys and tins of fruit.

It had a long sighing sweep over the fields from Bird-in-Eye, and

just across the road was a willow pond, from which it seemed to

drink sadness. Over the banks of papered tins and paint-slopped toys

he could see the grey bending backs of the willows, and the steely

ruffle of the pond under the wind. His throat grew tight with a word

that was stuck in it—“Good-bye.”

The door of the back room opened, and there was a leap of firelight

and the song of a kettle before it shut.

“Evenun, Mus’ Tom,” said Mrs. Honey.

“Evenun,” said Tom. “A packet of Player’s, please.”

Thyrza put it on the counter. “Any sweeties?”

“Yes. I’ll taake a quarter of bull’s-eyes and four-penn’orth of

telephones. I woan’t leave them behind me this time”—and Tom grinned

sheepishly.

“Your brothers and sisters ull miss you,” said Thyrza, poking with a

knife at the sticky wedge of the bull’s-eyes.

“Not more’n I’ll miss them and the whole plaace.”

“I reckon it’s sad to say good-bye.”

“Unaccountable sad.”

Her eyes were fixed on him very tenderly. She was sorry for Tom

Beatup—had always been a little sorry for him—she could not quite

tell why.

“It’ll be a long time before I see you again, Thyrza.”

“Maybe not—you may git leave and come to see us.”

He shook his head——“Not yet awhile.”

His parcels lay before him, but she did not expect him to go. He was

leaning across the counter, staring at her with big, solemn eyes,

and she knew that she liked his face, broad and ruddy as a September

moon, that she liked the whole sturdy set of him.

“Stay and have a bit of supper wud me, Tom.” It was quite

unconsciously that they had become Tom and Thyrza to each other.

The colour burned into his cheeks, but he shook his head.

“No, thank you kindly. I’ve got to git back hoame. I’ve a dunnamany

things to do this last evenun.”

“Then come on your fust leave.”

“Reckon I will——Oh, Thryza!”

His hunger had outrun his shyness. He was trembling. She had lifted

her hand to smooth back the soft fuzz of her hair, which in the dusk

had become the colour of hay in starlight, and as she dropped her

hand, he caught it, and held it, then kissed it. It was warm and wide

and soft and rather sticky.

“Oh, Tommy——”

“D’you mind, Thyrza?”

“I?—Lord, no, dear.”

He was still holding her hand across the counter, and now he slowly

pulled her towards him. Her darling face was coming closer to him out

of the shadows; he could smell her hair....

Buzz—Ting.

Their hands dropped and they started upright, both looking utterly

foolish. The Reverend Henry Poullett-Smith sniffed an air of

constraint as he entered.

“Good evening, Mrs. Honey. I came to leave this—er—notice about the

Empire Day performance at the schools. Perhaps you’ll be so kind as

to show it in the window, and—er—come yourself.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll put it here by the tinned salmon. That’s what

gets looked at most.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Honey. Hullo, Beatup—I didn’t see you in this dim

light.”

“I’ll be gitting the lamp,” said Thyrza.

Tom swept his parcels off the counter into his pockets, and muttered

something about “hoame.”

“This is your last day, isn’t it?” asked the curate.

“Yessir. Off to-morrow.”

“Sorry?”

“Middling sorry, for some reasons.”

“But it will be a big experience for you.”

The curate was young, and sometimes vaguely hankered after that

adventure in which no priests but those of godless France might

share. It was hard to see it being wasted on a pudding-headed chap

like Beatup.

Tom only grunted his reply to this challenge. He was angry with

the parson for having come into the shop, discreet as had been his

entry. He did not think of waiting till he had gone, for somehow no

one, especially a man, ever left Thyrza’s shop in a hurry, as if

the tranquil dawdle of the shopkeeper communicated itself to her

customers, making them lounge and linger long after their purchases

were made.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Honey.”

“Good-bye, Tom.”

“Good-bye, and good luck,” said the curate, shaking hands.

The bell buzzed again, and Tom was out in the throb and shudder of

the wind, while Thyrza lit the lamp in the house behind him.

When he reached home he found all the family at supper, except Harry,

who after a fortnight’s doubtful virtue had, on his brother’s last

night at home, escapaded off with two young Sindens from Little

Worge. Mrs. Beatup was inclined to be tearful about it. “Wot we’ll

do when you’re agone, Tom, Lord only knows.” Of late she had taken

to treating Tom’s departure as a voluntary, not to say capricious,

act, and her frequent lamentations were gabbled with reproach,

vague hints that if he had liked he could have prevented the

catastrophe—precisely how, she never told him.

Mus’ Beatup was not drunk. Only a negative statement could describe

him, for neither was he sober. An alcoholic Laodicean, neither hot

nor cold, he lolled over the head of the table, and argued with

Nell, the pupil-teacher, on the utter futility of the Church of

England, or, indeed, any sort of Church. It was characteristic of

Nell that she would argue with her father, drunk or sober. She had

championed her causes against a far less responsible adversary than

she had before her to-day. Her cheeks were pink with refutation,

and her little sighs and exclamations and chipped beginnings of

phrases popped like corks round Mus’ Beatup’s droning eloquence—that

eloquence which so filled Tom with admiration and made him boast of

his father’s book-learning among the farms.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face, and has all bin proved over

and over again as there wuren’t no such persons as Adam and Eve.

There’s a chap called Darwin’s proved as we’re the offsprings of

monkeys, and a chap called Bradlaugh ’s proved as we all come out of

stuff called prottoplasm—so where are your Adam and Eve, I’d lik to

know?”

“But, father, as if it mattered. The Church....”

“The Church is there to prove as the world was maade in six days,

when it’s bin proved over and over again as it hasn’t.”

“The Church is there for no such thing—it’s——”

“I tell you it’s bin proved as it’s there for that very purpose.”

“Who’s proved it?”

“Darwin and Huxley and Bradlaugh, and a lot more clever chaps.”

“But they lived years ago, and it’s——”

“Not so many years ago as your Adam and Eve, and yet you go and

believe in them....”

“I don’t. Not in the sense....”

“When it’s bin proved as there never wur no Adam and Eve. The fust

people wur monkeys, descended from prottoplasm, and then caum the

missing lynx and then caum us. I tell you it’s all bin proved over

and over again, and parson chaps and silly gals aun’t likely to prove

anything different.”

Tom listened respectfully, if rather grudgingly, to this learned

conversation. He wanted to talk to his father about one or two

matters concerning the farm, but knew there would be no chance for

him to-night. He kept up at intervals a grunting intercourse with his

mother, who wanted every other minute to know where he’d been and

where Harry had got to, and what in the Lord’s name they were to do

without him. Into the bargain, he ate a hearty supper, for though he

was in love and rather miserable, he was also a healthy young animal,

sharp-set after a day in the open air.

At last the theological argument ended, not because it was any nearer

solution or had indeed moved at all from its first premises, but

because the end of supper dispersed the combatants, Nell to her work,

and Mus’ Beatup, ignominiously, to the kitchen sink. Having relieved

his stomach of its load of bad beer and half-masticated food, he

went grumbling upstairs to bed, wondering what we were all coming to

nowadays, and why nobody stopped the war.

Mrs. Beatup reckoned, with a sigh, that she had better go to bed too,

as Maaster didn’t like it if she disturbed him later. So she lit her

candle, and went slowly creaking upstairs, leaving Ivy to clear away

the supper. Just where the stairs bent, she suddenly stood still, as

if a thought had struck her.

“Tom,” she called.

He was cleaning his boots in the outer kitchen, but when he heard her

he ran up to where she stood, thick against her monstrous shadow in

the angle of the stairs.

“It’s queer as you never think of kissing your mother.”

He had not kissed her for weeks, but now, suddenly troubled, he did

so.

“I’m sorry, mother.”

“And so you may be—on your last night, too.”

He stood looking at her sheepishly.

“Well, git down to your business. I mustn’t linger, or Maaster ull be

gitting into bed in his boots.”

He went downstairs, feeling suddenly smartingly sorry for his mother

as she waddled upwards to this drunkard’s bed. He saw that her lot

was a hard one.

The passage was in darkness, and Tom did not see, but felt, the side

door swing open, with a damp drench of wind from the yard. There was

a grey mist in the passage. The next minute a white stick-like thing

flew out of it, suddenly like the wind, and then bumped into Tom,

with the unexpected contact of warm flesh against his hands, and

“Oo-er,” in Harry’s voice.

“Harry....”

“Oh, that’s you, Tom? Lemme git up and fetch some cloathes.”

“But where’s those as you went out in?”

“I dunno. I’ll tell you afterwards, but I’m coald, and I want my

supper.”

The slow, facile anger of his type went tingling into Tom’s speech

and hands.

“Supper! I’m hemmed if you git so much as a bite. Tell me this wunst

where you left your cloathes or I’ll knock your head off, surelye.”

He laid violent hands on Harry, who was, however, far too slippery

to hold. He was free in a minute and dashed into the outer kitchen,

slamming the door after him.

When Tom came in he was sitting tailor-fashion on the table, gnawing

the top of a cottage loaf. The elder brother could not help laughing

at him, he looked such a queer goblin creature.

“Doan’t be vrothered, Tom,” whined Harry, taking advantage of his

relenting—“it’s your last night at home.”

Tom winced—they were always throwing it at him, his “last night.”

“Lucky fur you as it is—and unlucky fur me—and unlucky fur Worge if

this is the way you’re going on when I’m a-gone. Where’ve you bin?”

“Only over to Bucksteep, Tom.”

“But wot have you done wud your clothes?”

“Mus’ Archie’s got ’em.”

“Wot d’you mean? Spik the truth.”

“It’s Bible truth. Willie and Peter Sinden and Bob Pix and me thought

as how we’d bathe by moonlight in Bucksteep pond, and Mus’ Archie’s

hoame on leave, and he wur walking wud his young woman in the

paddock, and he sawed us, and took all our cloathes whiles we wur in

the water. He thought as how he’d got us then, and that we couldn’t

git away wudout our cloathes. But he’s found he’s wrong, fur we

climbed up the far bank into Throws Wood, and ran hoame.”

“You mean to tell me as you’ve come in your skin all the way from

Bucksteep?”

Harry nodded, and laughed at some Puckish memory.

“Well, all I wonder is as you wurn’t took and put in gaol—you would

have been if policeman had met you—and you’ll catch your death of

cold.”

He pulled off his coat and most ungently bundled Harry into it. Then

another idea struck him. He groaned, and scratched his head.

“I must write to Mus’ Archie this wunst.”

“Why, Tom?”

“To git your clothes back. We can’t afford to lose a good suit of

clothes.”

He turned wearily to the cupboard, and took out a penny ink-bottle, a

pen, and some cheap writing-paper.

“Tom—he’ll know it wur me if you write.”

“I can’t help that—we must git your clothes back.”

“But they were only old cloathes.”

“Adone-do, Harry. We can’t afford to lose so much as an old shirt.

Oh, you’re vrothering me to madness wud your doings.”

He began to scrawl in his slow, round hand. He was no letter-writer,

and found it difficult to put his request into words. He also wanted

to plead for Harry, to explain a little of his own hard case, and ask

that the matter might be allowed to stop at the scare and scolding

Harry had received, for “I am joining up to-morrow, and it is very

hard to leave them all like this, from your obedient servant Thomas

Beatup.”

Harry watched him, bobbing over the sheet, every now and then passing

his tongue over his lips in the agony of composition. Then suddenly

he slid towards him across the table and put his arm round his neck.

Tom shook him off.

“Git away.”

“I’m sorry I’m such a hemmed curse to you, Tom.”

“You’re a hemmed curse indeed. I ask you to be a man in my plaace,

and you’re no more than a tedious liddle child.”

A sudden sense of the hopelessness of it all came over him—the net in

which he struggled, in which he was being dragged away from those he

could help and love. He dropped his head in his hands. Harry stood

for a moment awestruck beside him, a grotesque figure with Tom’s coat

hanging over his bare thighs. Then he turned and crept away to bed.

The clock struck nine, and Tom lifted his head. He was utterly weary,

but he knew that if he did not take his letter over to Bucksteep

to-night he would not have time in the morning. There was no good

leaving it to other hands to deliver, for he felt that his mother

would resent its humble tone, and perhaps send instead an angry

demand which, by rousing Mus’ Archie’s rage, might end by landing

Harry before the Senlac Bench. So he put on his father’s driving

coat, which hung in the passage and smelt of manure and stale

spirits, and let himself out into the soft, throbbing darkness, lit

only by a few dim stars of the Plough.

Bucksteep Manor was the smaller kind of country-house, smuggled away

from the cross-roads in a larch plantation, with a tennis lawn at the

back, and a more open view swinging over a copsed valley to Rushlake

Green. It had once been a farmhouse, but a wing had been added in

modern style, and inside, the low raftering had been swept away,

so that when Tom stood in the dimly-lighted hall, which had once

been the kitchen, he could look up to a ceiling dizzily high to his

sag-roofed experience.

The Lambs were the aristocracy of Dallington, a neighbourhood

strikingly empty of “society” in the country-house sense. They had

themselves been yeoman farmers a couple of generations back, and the

present squire still interested himself shamefacedly in Bucksteep’s

hundred acres. The Beatups had but little truck with the Manor;

precarious yeomen, no rents or dues demanded intercourse, and Mus’

Beatup had often been heard to say that some folks were no better

than other folks, for all their airs and acres.

Tom had given his letter to a rustling parlourmaid, and stood

meekly waiting for an answer, his large bovine eyes blinking with

sleepiness. From an adjoining room came the throaty music of a

gramophone, playing:

“When we wind up the Watch on the Rhine

Everything will be Potsdam fine....”

There was girls’ laughter, too—probably Miss Marian Lamb and Mus’

Archie’s intended—and every now and then he heard Mrs. Lamb’s voice

go rocketing up. He did not feel envious of all this jollity, neither

did it grate upon him; he just stood and waited under the shaded

lamps of the hall, and had nearly fallen asleep on his legs when

suddenly the door opened, with a flood of light and noise, and shut

again behind Mus’ Archie.

“Good evening, Beatup. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I couldn’t

make this out at first—had no idea your young brother was one of the

culprits to-night, or I shouldn’t have played that trick on ’em.”

“It doan’t matter, sir. Harry desarved it. It’s only as we can’t

afford to lose the clothes.”

“No, no, of course not. Come with me and pick his out of the pile,

and you can take them home.”

“Thank you, Mus’ Archie.”

He followed young Lamb into a little gun-room opening on the hall,

and was able to pick out Harry’s rather bobtail toilet from a muddle

of Sinden and Pix raiment.

“That’s all, is it? Wan’t anything to wrap ’em in?”

“No, sir, it aun’t worth it. Thank you kindly for letting me have the

things.”

“There was never any question of you not having them. I’ve no right

to keep ’em. So you’re joining up to-morrow?”

He was in uniform, but without his belt. Somehow to Tom he seemed a

burlier, browner man than the young squire whom before the war he

used to see out hunting, or shooting, or driving girls in his car.

“Yes, I’m joining up, as they say.”

“You don’t seem over-pleased about it.”

“I aun’t, particular.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you it’s the grandest job on earth, and

that all the chaps out there are having the time of their lives. It

wouldn’t be true, though I expect the Tribunal told you so.”

“Yessir; they said as if they were only ten years younger they’d all

be in it.”

“Of course they did. Well, I’ve been out there, and I’ve seen.... But

never mind; you’ll find that out for yourself, Beatup. However, I’ll

say this much—it isn’t a nice job, or a grand job, or even a good

job; but it’s a job that’s got to be done, and when it’s done we’ll

like to think that Sussex chaps helped do it.”

Tom’s heart warmed a little towards Mus’ Archie. He was making him

feel as he had felt when Bill Putland said, “We’re all eighteenth

Sussex hereabouts.”

“It aun’t the going as un vrother me, if it wurn’t fur leaving

Worge. I’m fretted as the plaace ull land at the auctioneer’s if I’m

long away. You see, I’ve always done most of the work, in my head

as well as wud my hands. Faather, he aun’t a healthy man, and the

others aun’t much help nuther. There’s only Harry lik to be any use,

and he’s such an unaccountable limb of wickedness—for ever at his

tricks—to-night’s only one of them.”

“Perhaps he’ll pull himself together and work for Worge when he sees

you’ve gone to fight for it.”

This was new light on the matter for Tom. Hitherto he had always

thought of himself as deserting Worge in its hour of need—it had

never occurred to him that his going was the going of a champion, not

of a traitor.

“Maybe it’s as you say, Mus’ Archie. Leastways, we’ll hope so.”

They were in the hall again now, and the gramophone was singing in

its spooky voice. “You called me Baby Doll a year ago.” Tom slowly

turned the handle of the front door, sidling out on to the step.

“Thank you for the clothes, Mus’ Archie. I’ll try and talk some sense

into Harry before I go.”

“Good night, Beatup, and good luck to you. I expect I’ll see some

more of you in the near future. All the chaps round here seem to

be drafted into the eighteenth. Bill Putland will be in our little

crowd, and Jerry Sumption—there’ll be quite a Dallington set at

Waterheel.”

“I hope I’ll be with you, Mus’ Archie.”

“I hope you will, Beatup. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

The door shut, and he was out in the drive, where the larches swung

against the moon.

Archie Lamb went back into the drawing-room, and put a new record on

the gramophone.

“Queer chap, Beatup,” he said to his mother. “I don’t know how he’ll

shape. He looks strong and steady, but I should say about as smart as

a mangold-wurzel.”

Tom swung along the dim road, where the shadows ran before him. The

new-risen moon looked over the hedge, an amber disc just past the

full, swimming against the wind from Satanstown. In the heart of the

wind seemed still to beat the pulse of those far-off guns, the ghost

of their day-long thunder. Over and over in his mind Tom turned his

new thought—that he was going to fight for Worge.

In a quarter of an hour he had come to Sunday Street. He could see

the moonlight lying like frost on the southward slope of the roofs,

and the windows of the Bethel were ghostly with it, as they stared

away to the marshes. The Bethel alone seemed awake in the little

huddle of sleeping cottages—it had a strange look of watchfulness

and waiting, its gaunt Georgian windows never had that comfortable

blinking air of the cottage lattices.... Tom did not like the Bethel

at night.

He looked across the road to the Horselunges, where Mr. Sumption

lived. A crack of light showed under the blind of the minister’s

room, and Tom’s heart gave a little thump of self-reproach, for he

had not till then thought of saying good-bye to him. He had not seen

much of Mr. Sumption lately, and had been too much absorbed in his

own concerns to think of him, but now he made up his mind to call

and say good-bye; it was past ten o’clock and he was very tired and

sleepy, nevertheless he walked up to the door of the Horselunges and

knocked.

Mrs. Hubble was in bed, as the hour demanded, so the door was opened

by her lodger.

“Hello, Tom. Anything the matter? Do they want me at Worge?”

Mr. Sumption was always childishly eager for some demand on his

pastoral ministrations, a demand which was seldom made, as he had

a disruptive bedside manner and the funds of his chapel did not

admit of the doles which made sick Dallington people endure the

consolations of the Church.

“No, thank you, they doan’t. I’ve just come to say good-bye.”

The minister’s forehead clouded—

“Oh, you’ve remembered me at last, have you? Thought it just as well

not to forget old friends before you go off to make new ones. Come

in.”

Tom, who had expected this greeting, followed Mr. Sumption upstairs

into the room which he called his study, but which had few points of

difference from any cottage living-room in Sunday Street. There was

a frayed carpet with a lot of dirt trodden into it, and a sun-sucked

wall-paper adhering as closely as possible to walls complicate of

beams and bulges. A solitary book-shelf supported _Jessica’s First

Prayer_, _Edwin’s Trial or The Little Christian Witness_, and kindred

works, cheek-by-jowl with _Burton’s Four Last Things_ and a cage of

white mice. There was another cage hanging in the window, containing

a broken-winged thrush which the pastor, after the failure of many

anathemas, had bought from one of those mysterious gangs of small

boys which prowl round villages. An old, old cat sat before the empty

grate, too decrepit to make more than one attempt a day on the thrush

or the mice, and now purring wheezily in the intervals of scratching

a cankered ear.

On the table was a wild, unwieldy parcel, from whose bursting sides

the contents were already beginning to ooze forth.

“I’m packing a parcel for Jerry,” said the minister. “I’d just

finished when you knocked.”

“It looks as if it was coming undone,” said Tom.

“So it does”—and Mr. Sumption glanced deprecatingly at his

handiwork. “If only I had some sealing-wax ... but the shop’s shut.”

“It’ll be open to-morrow,” said Tom, and pictured Thyrza pulling up

the blind and dusting the salmon-tins in the window ... long after he

had gone to catch the early train from Hailsham.

“Well, to-morrow’s time enough, as I can’t post it before then. It ud

be a pity for anything to get lost. There’s three shillings’ worth of

things in that parcel.”

“Have you had any more letters from Jerry?”

“Yes, I had one yesterday”—no need to tell Tom there had been no

others—“He wants chocolate and cigarettes, and I put in a tin of

cocoa besides, and some little squares to make soup of. He’ll be

unaccountable pleased.”

“How’s he gitting on?”

“Valiant. He likes being along of the other lads. The only thing that

worrits him is your sister.”

“My sister?”

“Yes, your sister Ivy. Seemingly she never answered a postcard he

wrote her ten days back, and you knows he’s unaccountable set on Ivy.”

“It aun’t no use, Mus’ Sumption. Ivy’s got no thought for him, I’m

certain sure, and he’s only wasting time over her.”

The minister’s comely face darkened, and he cracked his fingers once

or twice.

“It’s a pity, a lamentable pity. That boy of mine’s crazy on Ivy

Beatup. Are you sure she doesn’t care about him, Tom?”

“Well, who knows wot a gal thinks? I can only put two and two

together. But seemingly if she’d cared she’d have answered his

postcard.”

“Could you put in a word for him?”

Young Beatup shook his head—

“I woan’t meddle. If Ivy doan’t care I can’t maake her, and I reckon

mother’s unaccountable set against it too.”

He had said the wrong thing. Mr. Sumption’s eyes became like burning

pits. He swung his hands up and cracked them like a pistol.

“Set against it, is she? Set against my Jerry? Maybe he isn’t good

enough for her—a clergyman’s son for a farmer’s daughter.”

“I never said naun of that,” mumbled Tom uneasily, remembering his

mother’s reference to “gipsy muck.”

“It’s I as might be set against it,” continued the minister. “I tell

you that boy’s been bred and cut above your sister. I never sent him

to a board school along of farmers’ children—I taught him myself,

everything I learned at college. He’d know as much I do if he hadn’t

forgotten it. Yet I’m not proud; I know the boy wants your sister Ivy

and ull do something silly if he can’t get her, so when he writes to

me, ‘Where’s Ivy? Find out why she didn’t answer my postcard, and

tell her I’ll go mad if she doesn’t take some notice of me’—why,

then, I do my best—and get told my son’s not good enough for your

father’s daughter.”

“I never told you any such thing,” said Tom doggedly, “but I woan’t

spik to Ivy. She knows her own business best. If I were you I’d tell

Jerry straight as no good ull come of his going after her. She doan’t

want him—I’m certain sure of that.”

The pastor’s wrath had died down into something more piteous.

“I daresay you’re right, Tom, and maybe I did wrong to speak like

that. After all, I was only a blacksmith till the Lord called me

away.... I pray that He may not require my boasting of me.”

“Well, I’m unaccountable sorry about Ivy being lik that, but I

thought it better to spik plain.”

Mr. Sumption sat down rather heavily at the table.

“O Lord, how shall I tell Jerry? If I tell him he’ll do something

wild, sure as he’s Jerry Sumption.”

“Doan’t tell him. He’ll find out for himself soon enough.”

Mr. Sumption groaned.

“Tom Beatup,” he said slowly, “I reckon you think I’m a faithless,

unprofitable steward so to set my heart on human flesh and blood. But

you’ll understand a bit of what I feel ... some day, when you’re the

father of a son.”

The pale morning ray came slanting over the sky from Harebeating

towards the last stars. Slowly the trees and hedges loomed out

against the trembling yellow pools of the dawn. Colours woke in the

fields, soft hazy greens, and blues and greys that ran together like

smoke ... ponds began to gleam among the spinneys, discs of mirrored

sky, that from lustreless white became glassy yellow, then kindled

from glass to fire, then smouldered from fire to rust.

Tom saw the window square light up and frame the familiar picture

of a life’s mornings—the oasthouse, the lombardy poplar topping the

barn, the little patch of distant fields seen between the oast and

the jutting farmhouse gable. The bed was pulled up close to the

window, to allow of the door being opened, and he could lie on his

side and look straight out at the loved common things which perhaps

he might never see just so again.

It all looked very quiet, and rather cold, and the early sunless

light gave it a peculiar lifelessness, as if it was something

painted, or cut in cardboard. Even Tom was conscious of its cold,

dreamlike quality; he always said that “the yard looked corpsy

at break o’ day.” Then the distant view of little fields suddenly

swam into golden light, as a long finger of sunlight stroked the

barn-roofs, then stabbed in at the window, throwing a shaft of

dancing golden motes across the room. Tom rose, climbed out of bed

over Zacky, and in about three square feet of floor space shaved and

dressed. Then he went downstairs, unlocked the house door and stole

out to his last morning’s work.

No one was about; it was not till more than an hour later that the

two antique farm-hands, Elphick and Juglery, came up from Worge

Cottages. By that time Tom had milked the cows, mixed the chicken

food, and driven the horses down to Forges field. He gave the two

unskilled labourers their orders for the day as if he expected to be

there to see them carried out. By that time Ivy was hunting for eggs,

and Mrs. Beatup was struggling with the kitchen fire, while Mus’

Beatup, in practical, unlearned mood, had gone to the Sunk field to

inspect the ewes.

As Ivy came out of the hen-house and crossed the yard, cheery,

healthy, blowsy, with eggs in a bowl, Tom had a sudden thought of

giving her Mr. Sumption’s message. But he held his tongue. He had

meant what he said when he told the minister he was not going to

meddle. He had long been convinced of the fact that his sister knew

her own business; besides, Jerry ... that lousy gipsy chap.... Pastor

might say he was getting on valiant, but all Dallington knew that he

had been given seven days C.B. within a week of his joining.

So, with nothing for Ivy but a nod, Tom went in to breakfast. Time

was short, but the breakfast was still in a rudimentary state. Mrs.

Beatup fought with the kitchen fire among whorls of smoke, while

Nell, coughing pathetically, laid the table. Harry in a fit of

brotherly love was cleaning Tom’s best boots ready for his journey

to Lewes—no one ever went to Lewes in any but Sunday clothes.

“Oh, is that you, Tom? I hope as you aun’t in a hurry. This fire’s

bewitched. Nell, give your brother a cut off the loaf. You’d better

git started, Tom, or you’ll lose your train.”

So Tom’s last breakfast at Worge was eaten in confusion and mess,

the family dropping in one by one for cuts off the loaf or helpings

of cold bacon spotted with large blisters of grease. Last of all the

breakfast arrived, in the shape of the tea-pot, and a special boiled

egg for Tom. He was not able to do more than gulp down the egg and

scald himself with the tea. Then it was time to go. He had already

tied up a few little things in a handkerchief—a razor, a piece of

soap, an old frosted Christmas card which for some obscure reason he

treasured—so there was nothing to do but to say good-bye and beat it

for Hailsham, a good seven miles.

Mus’ Beatup put down his tea-cup and looked solemn.

“Well, good-bye, my lad. I reckon you’ve got to go. Everyone’s off

to fight now, seemingly, so I suppose you must do wot others do. Not

that I think so much of this war as some folks seem to—it’s bin going

on nigh two years now, and I can’t see as we’re any of us a penny the

better off. Howsumdever....”

“He’s going to stop it,” said Nell, her face pink.

“Ho, is he? Well, I’ve no objection. Maybe I’ll write you a letter,

Tom, when Maudie calves.”

“I’d be much obliged if you would, faather, and tell me how the wheat

does this year, and them new oats by the Street.”

“Good-bye, Tom,” said Harry. “I shall miss you unaccountable.”

“And I’ll miss you, too,” said Zacky, “but there’ll be more room in

the bed.”

Tom kissed them sheepishly all round, then walked out of the door

without a word.

He was in the yard, when he heard footsteps creaking after him, and

turned round to see his mother.

“Wait a bit, Tom,” she panted; “I’ll go wud you to the geate.”

He was surprised, but it did not strike him to say so. They walked

down the drive together almost in silence, the boy hanging his head.

Mrs. Beatup sniffed and choked repeatedly.

“Doan’t go near those Germans, Tom,” she said, when they came to a

standstill. “If you do, you’ll be killed for certain sure.”

“I’ll go where I’m put, surelye,” said Tom gloomily.

“Well, be careful, that’s all. Kip well behind the other lads, and

doan’t go popping your head over walls or meddling wud cannons. And

kip your feet dry, Tom, and doan’t git into temptation.”

“I promise, mother,” he mumbled against her neck, and they kissed

each other many times before she let him go.

The Rifle Volunteer looked down from his sign, where he stood in the

grey uniform and mutton-chop whiskers of an earlier dispensation,

and stared at the stocky, shambling little figure that trudged its

unwilling way to sacrifice—past Worge Cottages, stewing in the

sunshine like pippins, past Egypt Farm (which Bill Putland would

leave later and more conveniently in his father’s dog-cart), past the

shop, with a glance half shy, half beseeching, at the drawn blinds,

past the willow pond, out of Sunday Street, into the long yellow road

that led to the unsought, undesired adventure.