1
That autumn and winter there was a lot of talk in the papers
about food. Wedged into news of the Ancre and Beaumont Hamel, the
crumpling-up of Roumania under von Mackensen, and President Wilson’s
Peace Note, came paragraphs and letters and articles on food and
the ways of economising and producing it. The latter most troubled
Harry, as he thought of the modest spring-sowings of Worge. If it was
indeed true that the German U-boats were threatening the country’s
wheat supply, might it not be as well to reclaim the old tillage of
the Sunk Field or even break up grass-land in the high meadows by
Bucksteep?
Harry did not often read the papers, getting all his news from the
_Daily Express_ poster which Mrs. Honey displayed outside the shop
when the papers arrived at noon; but when paper-restrictions brought
posters to an end, he went skimming through Mus’ Beatup’s _Sussex
News_, and one day skimming was changed to plodding by a very solid
article on wheat-production and the present needs.
In many ways it was a revelation to Harry. Though he had been
a farm-boy all his life it had never struck him till then that
grain-growing was of any importance to the nation, or imagined that
the Worge harvests mattered outside Worge. The fields, the stock had
been to him all so many means of livelihood, and the only motive
of himself and his fellow-workers the negative one of keeping
Worge from the auctioneer’s. If he ever realised his part in the
great adventure, it was only when he saw his duty to keep the place
together for Tom to fight for. This was his newest and highest
motive, and when he refused the call of distant woods, broke with the
Brownbread rat-and-sparrow club, and paid no more than a business
visit to Senlac Fair, it was so that Tom’s sacrifice should not be in
vain. But here was a chap making out that a farmer was very nearly
as important as a soldier, and that it was on the wheat-fields of
England as well as on the battlefields of France that the war would
be won....
After this, Harry always read the food-supply news, and pondered
it. Was it indeed true that the war which was being waged with such
gallantry and fortitude abroad might be lost at home? For the first
time he had a personal interest in the struggle, apart from the
interest he felt through Tom. Hitherto the war had meant nothing to
him, because he had thought he meant nothing to the war—he was too
young to be a soldier, probably always would be, since everyone said
that peace would come next year. All he had had of warfare was the
distant throb and grumble of guns a hundred miles away—not even a
prowling Taube or lost Zeppelin had visited the country within the
Four Roads. First the lighting order, then the liquor control, then
the Conscription Act—only thus and indirectly had the war touched
him, requiring of him merely a passive part. But now he saw that he
also might take his active share, and the realisation set fire to his
clay.
The winter was a bad one—bitterly cold, with thick green ice on the
ponds, and a skimming of hard snow on the fields, where the soil
was like iron. The marshes of Horse Eye were sheeted with a frozen
overflow, and the wind that rasped and whiffled from the east,
stung the skin like wire, and piercing the cracks of barns, made
the stalled cattle shiver and stamp. There was little work on the
farm, though Harry had done his best to fulfil Tom’s injunctions, and
had carted his manure and turned a strong furrow to the frost. The
lambing had been got through somehow—but two ewes and three or four
lambs had died, as they would never have done if Tom had been there.
At every turn Harry was faced by his own inexperience, and learned
only at the price of many disappointments and much humiliation.
But he was the type which failure only makes dogged, and his
unsuccessful winter helped his new sense of the country’s need
in making him plan daringly for the spring. He resolved that his
apprenticeship should not last beyond the winter—it was his own fault
that it had lasted so long—and in March he would get to business, and
start his scheming for doubling the grain acreage of the farm.
There were several acres of old tillage to be reclaimed, and Harry
was young and daring and amateurish enough to contemplate also
breaking up grass-land. He would of course have to consult his father
first. Mus’ Beatup had spent a sorry winter, “kipping the coald
out” at the Rifle Volunteer. The slackness of farm work, the cold
and discomfort of the weather, the growing unpalatableness of his
meals, all combined for worse results than usual, and by the time
of the keen wintry spring there was no denying that a good slice of
both his physical and mental vigour had been eaten away. However, he
was still the nominal head of the farm, and must be consulted—Tom
would have had it so. Unfortunately, Harry chose the wrong day. Mus’
Beatup was sober, but suffering from an internal chill as a result of
having lain for an hour in the frozen slush a couple of nights ago,
before Nimrod the watch-dog found him and brought Harry out with his
frantic barks. To-day he sat by the fire, shuddering and muttering to
himself, drinking a cup of hot cocoa and swearing at his wife because
there was no sugar in it.
“I can’t git none,” wailed Mrs. Beatup. “I tried at the Shop, and
Nell tried in Brownbread Street, and Ivy’s tried in Dallington, and
Harry asked when he wur over at Senlac market....”
“And have you tried Rushlake Green and Punnetts Town and Three Cups
Corner and Heathfield and Hellinglye and Hailsham? You try a bit
further afore you dare to give me this stuff.”
“But there aun’t none in the whole country—so I’ve heard tell.”
“Maybe. Reckon Govunmunt’s got it all, saum as they’ve got all the
beer and the spirits. They’ve got pounds and pounds of it, those
there Cabinick Ministers, and eat it for breakfast and dinner and
tea. I tell you I’m dog-sick of this war, and I’m hemmed if I move
another step to help a Govunmunt as taakes fust our beer and then our
boys, and then our sugar”—and Mus’ Beatup spat dramatically into the
fire, as if it were Whitehall.
The moment was not propitious, but Harry had to consider the weather,
which showed possibilities that must be made use of at once. Mus’
Beatup listened wearily to his suggestions.
“Oh, it’s more wheat as they want, is it? They’re going to take
that next.... Reclaim the oald tillage? Wot did we let it go fallow
fur, if it wurn’t cos it dudn’t pay the labour?... Break up the
grass-land? You’ll be asking to plough the kitchen floor next.”
“If we doan’t do summat, I reckon we’ll be maade to.”
“Reckon we will—saum as we wur maade to give up Tom. And they say
this country’s fighting Prussian tyranny.”
“Well, faather, if we doan’t grow more corn we’ll lose the war. I wur
reading in the paapers as all our corn and wheat used to come from
furrin parts, but now, wud ships wanted to carry soldiers and them
hemmed U-boats spannelling around....”
“You talk lik the _Sussex News_. Wot d’you want to go vrothering
about them things fur? You do your work and doan’t go roving.”
“Faather, I aun’t bin roving all this winter.”
“No, you aun’t—that’s a good lad, fur sartain sure.”
“And if you let me do this job, I promise I’ll stick to it and pull
it through.”
“You might as well chuck your money into the pond as spend it on
grain-growing nowadays.”
“Not wud all these new arrangements the Govunmunt’s maade ...
guaranteed prices and all. Oh, faather, let me try as I said. I want
to do my bit saum as Tom.”
“Seemingly your bit’s to land Worge at the auctioneer’s. Howsumdever,
do wot you lik—I’m ill and helpless and oald. I can’t stop you. Now
adone do wud all this vrotherification of a poor sick man, and ask
mother to let me have a spoonful of syrup in this nasty muck.”
2
So on Harry, sixteen years old, with little or no experience, and a
bad character to live down, fell the task of bringing Worge into line
with a national endeavour. It was strange how his earthy imagination
had taken fire at the new idea, and a curious justification of the
Press. A sense of patriotism had wakened in him, as it had not
wakened in Tom after nearly a twelve-month’s service. Tom was no
longer indifferent or unwilling, but his enthusiasm scarcely went
beyond the regiment—the feeling of “Sussex chaps”—the idea of
fighting for Worge, or, at the most abstract, “having a whack at
Kayser Bill.”
He had been in France about three months now. He had not been sent
over as soon as he expected, but in November there had been a big
draft from the 18th Sussex, including Tom and Jerry and Bill, also
Mus’ Archie—Mus’ Dixon, who had been badly gassed on the Somme,
stayed behind in charge of “School,” and rumour said that he would
not be sent out again. So far Tom seemed to have had a far duller
time abroad than in England; he had not so much as seen a German; and
his letters home were chiefly about mud. The family jealously hinted
that his letters to Thyrza Honey were more entertaining. However, he
kept his promise to Harry, and sent him councillor postcards now and
again. The last had consisted of just one word—“spuds!”
That was the spring when potatoes were being sold at sixpence a pound
in Eastbourne and Hastings, and such inducements were held out to
growers, that instead of the usual modest half-acre, Harry intended
to make potatoes part of his new scheme. The two-acre was in potash
this year, also the home field, and Harry decided to break up the
pasture-land next the orchard. Some of the space would have to be
used for roots—swedes and wurzels—but there would be a spud-growing
such as Worge had never seen in its history.
Then there was the more ticklish problem of the grain, and what kinds
to sow. Harry took Tom’s advice and decided on Sandy oats for the
Street field and the field next the Volunteer. In the home field he
would grow awned wheat—and red spring wheat on the reclaimed tillage
of the Sunk Field.
Then came the problem of which grass-lands to break up. If only Tom
had been there to advise him! He dare not ask his father, in case
he should withdraw his first permission. Breaking up grass-land is
heresy to an orthodox farmer, and it was quite possible that Mus’
Beatup would change his mind when it came to the crisis. For this
reason Harry said no more about it, and planned craftily to start
work on one of his father’s “bad days,” when he would not be likely
to interfere. Left without counsel, he decided to break up the
rest of the Sunk Field, also Forges Field, and an old pasture at
the Bucksteep end of the farm. These were wretched soils and would
have to be heavily manured; but none of the soils round Worge was
really good, and some decent grass must be left for the cows and
ewes. Manures were scarce and dear, owing to the war, but Harry
thought he could make shift with the farmyard dung, supplemented by
a little night-soil, and a ton of waste from the gypsum mines near
Robertsbridge.
All this cost him more thinking than he had ever done in his life.
Once or twice he lay awake from bed-time till dawn, adding up
figures, working out ways and means, and making plans for settling
any opposition, drunk or sober, from Mus’ Beatup. His responsibility
was enormous, but he was at bottom too simple-minded to feel the
full weight of it, and his enthusiasm flamed as clear as ever. By
crabbed and common means—even the smudgy columns of a provincial
newspaper—the vision had come to a country boy’s heart, and
found there a divine, undeveloped quality of imagination, and an
undisciplined power of enterprise. These two, which had hitherto
united to keep him from his work, were now forged together in the
heat of the new idea. But for the first he would never have heard the
call, and the second alone made it possible that he should obey it.
3
Harry could not help laughing at the faces of Juglery and Elphick
when he told them he meant to plough the Sunk Field.
“Brëak up grass, Mus’ Harry!”
“Surelye! They’re asking farmers all over the country to grow more
wheat.”
“Does Maaster know as you mean to plough the Sunk?”
“Reckon he does. I cud never do it wudout he let me.”
“Well,” said old Juglery, “I’ve bin on farm-work man and boy these
dunnamany year, and I’ve only bruk up grass two times, and no good
come of it, nuther. Wunst it wur fur oald Mus’ Backfield up at Odiam,
him wot caum to nighe a hundred year, and then took a fit last
fall and died of joy when he heard as wheat wur ninety shillings a
quarter. T’other wur pore young Mus’ Pix of the Trulilows, and he
bruk up a valiant pasture, and the oats caum up crawling about like
pease, and each had a gurt squlgy root lik a pertater. I says to him,
being young and joking like in those days, ‘You’re unaccountable
lucky,’ says I, ‘to grow pease and pertaters on the same stalk,’ but
he took it to heart, and went and shot himself in the oast. So you
see as boath the yeomen I bruk up grass fur died, one o’ joy and
t’other o’ sorrow.”
“Well, I shan’t die of nuther, and we’ll have the plough out Thursday
if the weather hoalds.”
The men were getting used to being ordered about by Harry. Mus’
Beatup’s chill had gone off in a twisting bout of rheumatism, which
returned every now and then with damp weather. He spent, therefore,
a good deal of time in the house, with sometimes a hobble as far
as the Rifle Volunteer, appearing only in the dry, frosty weather
when little could be done with harrow or plough. However, when
neighbouring farmers began to remark on the enterprise of Worge, he
was careful to take the credit to himself—indeed he almost fancied
that it was his own doing, for Harry, who could have done nothing
without his authority, was careful to consult him on every occasion,
and it was Mus’ Beatup who ordered the grain and checked the
accounts, with many groans and dismal foretellings.
Those were good days for Harry, behind his plough. Under the soft
grey spring sky, rifted and stroked by wandering primrose lights,
through the damp air that smelled of living mould, over the brown
earth that rolled and sprayed like a wave from the driving coulter,
he toiled sweating in the raw March cold. The smell of earth, the
smell of his own sweat, the smell of the sweat of his horses hung
thick over the plough, but every now and then soft damp puffs of air
would blow into the miasma the fragrance of grass and primrose buds,
of sticky, red, uncurling leaves, and the new moss in the woods. The
share gleamed against the dun, and the brown twigs of the copses drew
their spindled tracery against a sky which was the paler colour of
earth—sometimes a shower would fall, slanting along the hedges, the
thick drops tasting on Harry’s lips of the unfulfilled spring.
His work made him very tired. After all, he was barely seventeen, and
though sturdy had only just begun to use his strength. The work of
the farm was much increased by the new plan, yet it was impossible
to bring extra hands to it, except occasionally by the conscription
of Zacky. Harry milked and ploughed and scattered and dug, rising in
the foggy blue darkness of the morning, and often sitting up late
over calculations and accounts. Elphick and Juglery gave a pottering,
rheumatic service, Mus’ Beatup could only be irregularly relied
upon. So in time Harry learned what it was to doze off out of sheer
weariness over his supper, or fall across the bed asleep before he
had pulled his trousers off. But strangely enough, he found the life
no hardship. Before the first thrill of enterprise had passed he was
beginning to like the work for its own sake. There was a new keen
pleasure in the wearing of his muscles, almost a physical luxury
in his fatigue, and the lying with spread limbs before the fire of
evenings. His life seemed good and full—everything was worth while,
eating or sleeping or toiling or resting. For the earth sometimes
makes of her servants lovers.
He was far too busy during his working hours and weary during
his leisure to find much temptation in his old errant pleasures.
Willie Sinden appealed in vain to a grimy, sweaty Harry asleep
for an hour before the fire at night—he was too unaccountable
wearied to vrother about ratting or Willie’s new ferret; and he
went to Senlac and Heathfield and Hailsham Fairs to sell beasts,
not to drink ginger-beer or pot into the German Kaiser’s mouth in
the shooting-gallery. Even the distant woods had ceased to call,
for Harry was now tasting their adventure in his daily work. The
chocolate furrows of the Sunk Field were part of that same wonder
which had teased him in the fluttering hazels of Molash Spinney or
the wind in the gorse-thickets of Thunders Hill. The far-off village
green of Bird-in-Eye was not more full of spells than the new-sown
acres by Forges Wood. By his toil, and because he toiled as a man,
from the spark of imagination within him, and not as a beast from the
grind of circumstances without, he had brought the distant adventure
home.
4
In February Tom’s letters became more rousing. The 18th Sussex took
part in the big advance on the Ancre, and though Tom himself did
not do anything very exciting, he was no longer in the humiliating
position of having never seen a German. His descriptions of battle
were rather fumbling—“Then we had some tea and a chap got in from the
Glosters who had his tunick torn something terrible.”—“We come into
a French village full of apple-trees and the walls were down so as
you saw into the houses, and in one house there was a pot of ferns on
the table.” He also confessed, in reply to a message from Zacky, that
though he had seen several Germans, “with faces like roots,” he had
not, to his knowledge, killed one.
Mus’ Beatup thought it necessary to improve on his son’s letters at
the pub.
“Tom’s having valiant times,” he would say to the bar of the Rifle
Volunteer or of the Crown at Woods Corner. “He killed a German
officer wud his bayunite and took his machine-gun. Mus’ Archie Lamb
is unaccountable proud of him, and says he’s sure to be a lieutenant
of the Sussex before long. He’s a good lad is my lad, and it’s a
tedious shaum as he was tuk away from his praaper personal wark and
maade a soldier of. There’s none of my folk bin soldiers up till
now—it’s yeomen we’re born and we doan’t taake wages.... When’s he
think the war ull stop?—Well, it might be any time, if the Govunmunt
doan’t starve us all fust.”
Sometimes Thyrza Honey brought Tom’s letters up to read to the family
at Worge. She was rather shy of her future relations-in-law, who made
no special effort to be agreeable to her. Mrs. Beatup persisted in
looking on her as a designing woman who had forcibly captured the
innocent Tom, Nell was too clever for her, and the males were grumpy
and sidling. Only Ivy seemed to like her, but Ivy was on bad terms
with her family at present, as ever since young Kadwell on leave had
forsaken his sweetheart of the Foul Mile for her robuster charms,
and the deserted one had turned up in rage and dishevelment to make
a personal protest at Worge, the Beatups had chosen to resent her
“goings on.” They also threw Jerry Sumption in her teeth and vaguely
accused her of “things.” Now no young man ever came to Worge without
her parents lamenting that they had a light daughter, and rows were
frequent and undignified. So Ivy’s liking was no recommendation
of Thyrza, who in consequence was suspected of goings on herself.
However, she would not give up her visits, for she knew Tom liked her
to pay them, and often—rather tactlessly—sent messages to his family
through her.
Thyrza knew more about the British front and the Battle of the Ancre
than did the Beatups. Not that Tom could be eloquent even to her,
but her imagination, warmed by love, was quicker to piece together
the fragments and fill in the gaps. Also he told her things that he
would not have told the others. It was she who heard the details of
the great occasion on which he first actually and personally killed a
German.
“I was sentry, and you always feel as the place is full of Boshes,
and you think you see them and it isn’t them. Then one night after
moon-up I thought I saw a Bosh over against the enemy wire, and I
said to myself as he wasn’t a Bosh really, though my hair was all
standing up on my head. Then he moved and I let fly with my rifle as
I’ve done umpty times at nothing, and then he was still and I saw him
hanging on the wire. Reckon he was dead, but I went on putting round
after round into him I felt so queer—not scared only kind of enjoying
it like as if you were shooting at the Fair, only I knew as I was
killing something and it made me happy. But afterwards I got very
cold and sick.”
“He never tells us how he feels about things,” complained Mrs.
Beatup. “It’s never more’n ‘I had my dinner’ to us.”
“Reckon he doan’t git much time for writing letters. He knows as wot
he tells me gits passed on to you.”
“Well, I’ll never say naun agaunst you, Thyrza Honey, but I must
point out as he knew us afore he knew you. He’s unaccountable young
to be shut of his mother, and it ud be praaperer if his messages wur
to you through us.”
Mrs. Beatup’s voice was hoarse with dignity, and Thyrza hung her head.
“I’m the last as ud ever want to taake him away from his mother,” she
murmured—and ten days later Mrs. Beatup got a thick smudgy letter on
which Tom had spent hours of ink and sweat in obedience to Thyrza’s
command.
5
About a fortnight later an impudent-looking little girl with a
big mouth came wobbling up Worge drive on a bicycle, and from a
wallet extracted a telegram which she handed to Zacky, who sat on
the doorstep peeling a stick. Zacky ran with it to his mother, who
refused to open it.
“I’ll have no truck with telegrams—they’re bad things. Fetch your
faather.”
Zacky ran off in great excitement, and soon Mus’ Beatup came
lumbering in, very red after planting potatoes.
“Wot’s all this, mother?—another of those hemmed telegrams?”
“Yes, and I reckon Tom’s killed this time.”
“Can’t be—we only got a letter last night.”
“Ivy says they taake four days to come over. He may have bin killed
this mornun—got a shell in his stomach lik Viner’s poor young boy.”
“Maybe it’s to say he’s coming hoame,” said Zacky.
“Shurrup!” growled his father.
He tore the envelope, with a queer twitching of the corners of his
mouth.
“He aun’t killed,” he said shakily—“only wounded.”
A moan came from the mother’s parted lips, and she closed her eyes.
“Maybe it’s naun very tar’ble,” continued the father. “They said
‘serious’ in Mus’ Viner’s telegram; here it’s only—‘regret to inform
you that Private Beatup has been wounded in action.’”
“Will they let me go to him?”
“Aun’t likely—he’s over in France.”
Mrs. Beatup did not cry, but all the colour went from her face and
her lips were strangely blue. Then suddenly her head fell over the
back of the chair.
“Zacky!” shouted Mus’ Beatup—“fetch the whisky bottle that’s in the
pocket of my oald coat behind the door.”
He put his arm round his wife, and lifted her head to his shoulder,
while Zacky ran off with piercing howls. These were fortunately
louder than those of the poor duck whose neck Ivy was wringing
outside the stable. She rushed in, all bloody from her victim, and
in a few moments had laid her mother on the floor, unfastened her
dingy remains of stays, and dabbled her forehead with water, while
Mus’ Beatup, relieved of his stewardship, stumped about, groaning,
and drank the whisky himself. In the midst of it all the big-mouthed
little girl, forgotten in the drive, started beating on the door
and demanding “if there was an answer, please.” Zacky was sent to
dismiss her and vented his grief on the messenger of woe by putting
out his tongue at her till she was out of sight—a salute which she
returned with all the increased opportunities that nature had given
her.
Mrs. Beatup soon recovered.
“I caum over all swummy like ... this is the first time I’ve swounded
since Zacky wur born ... I reckon this is sharper than childbirth.”
The tears came at last, and she sobbed against Ivy’s bosom.
“Doan’t go vrothering, mother. I tell you it’s naun tar’ble. They
said ‘seriously’ when poor Sid Viner wur wounded to death, and Ted
Podgam in Gallipoli. Maybe they’ll send him hoame soon.”
“I want to go to him.... He’s got a hole in him.... Why do they kip
his mother from him when he’s sick? When he had measles he never let
go my hand one whole day, and he said, ‘Stay wud me, mother—I feel
tedious bad.’ Maybe he’s saying it now.”
“And maybe he aun’t. Maybe he’s setting up in bed eating chicken and
drinking wine, wud no more’n a piece off his big toe.”
She took out a dirty handkerchief and wiped her mother’s eyes. Then
she said:
“I maun go and tell Thyrza Honey.”
6
But the fates had decided to honour Tom’s mother above his sweetheart
in that it was she alone who bore the full grief of his wounding.
On her way to the shop, Ivy met Thyrza engaged in something as near
a run as her plump person was capable of, and waving in her hand a
letter. It was a pencil-scrawl written in hospital at Boulogne,
telling Thyrza not to vrother, because he was doing valiant. He had
got a Blighty one and hoped to be sent home soon. It was nothing
serious, only a bit of shrap in his foot. “Didn’t I tell mother as it
was no more’n a piece off his big toe?” cried Ivy triumphantly.
The letter had been Thyrza’s first news of Tom’s wound, and all the
anxiety and yearning she felt were swallowed up in the joy of his
coming home. A few days later she had a telegram from him, telling of
his arrival in hospital at Eastbourne, and by this time Mrs. Beatup
had recovered sufficiently to resent the fact that it had been sent
to Thyrza and not to her.
Everyone was glad that Tom was at Eastbourne, as it could be reached
from Sunday Street in a few hours by carrier’s cart and train. The
very next morning Mrs. Beatup and Mrs. Honey set out together, the
latter with a basket of eggs and flowers, and her pockets bulging
with Player’s cigarettes, the former nursing a weighty dough-cake,
beloved of Tom in ancient times, and so baked that she fondly hoped
he would never notice the nearly total absence of sugar and plums.
Thyrza looked very unlike herself in a close-fitting blue jersey and
knitted cap; Mrs. Beatup wore what she called her Sunday cape, which
is to say the cape she would have worn on Sundays if she had ever
had the leisure to go out, likewise her Sunday bonnet (similarly
conditioned), made of black straw and bearing a good crop of wheat.
The two women went by carrier’s cart to Hailsham, where they took
the train, arriving at Eastbourne soon after one. They went first to
a creamery, where they rather hesitatingly ordered poached eggs and
a pot of tea. The eggs were stale and the tea had not that “body”
which their custom required. Mrs. Beatup began to wonder what Tom was
getting to eat—if this was what you got when you paid for it, what
did you get when you didn’t pay for it? she’d like to know.
She was a little relieved at the sight of Tom, looking much fatter
and browner and better in hospital than she had ever seen him outside
it. He looked happy, too, with his broad face all grins to see them,
his mother and sweetheart. And since he looked so brown and well and
happy, she wondered why it was that she wanted so much to cry.
Thyrza did not want to cry. She held Tom’s hand, and laughed, and
was quite talkative, for her. She made him tell her over and over
again how he had been wounded, and how they had taken him to the base
hospital and then to Boulogne, and then in a hospital ship all signed
with the cross to Blighty. Mrs. Beatup made up her mind that next
time she would come alone.
And so she did—much to the surprise of her family, who had hitherto
found her full of qualms and fears even at the thought of a visit to
Senlac.
“I mun have my boy to myself whiles I’ve got the chance,” she said.
“Well,” remarked Ivy tactlessly, “I reckon he’d sooner have you
separate—he’ll be wanting Thyrza aloan a bit.”
“Will he, miss? That aun’t why I’m going different days. We aun’t all
lik you wud your kissings and loverings. I wish to goodness you’d git
married and have done.”
“And taake some poor boy away from his mother,” mocked Ivy. “I
wouldn’t be so cruel.”
Her mother made a swoop at her with her open hand, but Ivy dodged,
and ran off, laughing good-naturedly.
None of the other Beatups ever went to see Tom at Eastbourne. The
journey was too expensive, and they were sure to have him home on
leave before long. Mrs. Beatup went about twice a week, with various
messages from the rest of the family muddled up in her head. She
would sit beside him, holding his hand, strangely delicate with
sickness, between her own hard, cracked, work-weary ones, wishing
that they could find more to say to each other, and at the same time
cherishing those numbered moments when she could have him to herself.
Thyrza went oftener, shutting up shop with a recklessness that would
have ruined a less personal business. Tom’s only other visitor was
the Reverend Mr. Sumption.
He came one afternoon to inquire about Jerry, but Tom could not tell
him much. Jerry kept away from him, and the little that Beatup knew
of his doings he was anxious to conceal from his father.
“Maybe now he’s out there he’ll get on better,” he suggested.
“Better? He’s always done well,” said Mr. Sumption loftily. “He’ll
have to do unaccountable well if he does better. Don’t think, Tom,
that I came to you because I doubted my son, but he was never much of
a letter-writer, and now, being busy and all....”
That night Tom lay awake an hour or so, thinking of parents. It was
queer how they stuck to their children. His mother, now, coming all
this way to see him, though she was nervous of the journey and had
very little money to spend on it.... Mr. Sumption, too, standing
up for that lousy tyke of a Jerry.... Would he ever feel like this
for one of his own flesh—not only when that one lay helpless and
dependent on him, but had gone out from him and chosen his own path?
“Even as a father pitieth his children ...” so the Bible said, and
seemingly there was no bound or end to that pity. Perhaps one day he
would feel it in his own heart (the curve of Thyrza’s arms made him
think of a cradle). He remembered what Mr. Sumption had said to him
long ago, the night before he joined up—“You’ll understand a bit of
what I feel ... some day when you’re the father of a son.”
7
Perhaps it was the inactivity of the days that made Tom lie awake so
much at night. He generally had an hour or two to wait for sleep, and
it seemed as if in those hours his thoughts jumped and raced in a
way they never did by daylight. It was in those hours that he formed
his resolution to marry Thyrza before he went back to France. When
he left hospital he would probably have a fortnight or so at home,
and they could be married at once by licence. Then, he felt, with a
sudden swallowing in his throat, he would have had his little bit of
life, even if Fritz cut it short before he could see those arms he
loved become the cradle he had dreamed them.
The future meant even less to him now than the past. An almighty
present ruled the world in those days, for it was all that a man
could call his own. Lord! if that crump had dropped a few yards
nearer, he might have lost the chances he was grabbing now. He
wondered how a year ago he could ever have dreamed and dawdled over
his love for Thyrza, put off its declaration to a vague and distant
time which might never be. It was queer how he had counted on the
future then, made plans for doing things “sometime.” The last year
had taught him how close that sometime stood to Never. Not that Tom
felt any forebodings. Indeed, he had the optimistic fatalism of most
soldiers. He was safe until a shell came along with his number on,
and then—well, many better chaps’ numbers had been up before his.
Meantime, it was his business to seize the present hour and all it
contained, nor, when he planted, think of gathering, nor in the
seed-time dream of harvest.
He never doubted Thyrza’s readiness, and was a little surprised
when she mentioned things like “gitting some cloathes,” and “having
the house done.” Experience had not yet taught her to mistrust the
future—for her to-morrow always came, and must be decently prepared
for. However, when she saw how desperately Tom was set on marriage,
she brushed aside the scruples of habit with a heroism they both of
them failed to see.
“I’ll marry you soon as you come hoame, dear, and then we can have a
bit of honeymoon.”
“We’ll go away. I’ll take you to Hastings, maybe—we’ll git a room
there.”
“Oh, Tom! Lik a grand couple! We mun’t go chucking the money away.”
“We woan’t chuck it all away, but we’ll chuck a fair-sized bit. I
doan’t git much chance of spending out there.”
She looked at him tenderly.
“To think as I ever thought you wur slower nor me!”
“I wur a gurt owl,” said Tom. “Lord! if I’d a-gone West, and never so
much as kissed you....”
“But you did kiss me, dear—in the shop, the evenun afore you went
away.”
“Twur only your hand, and I wur all quaaking like a calf.”
Thyrza sighed.
“It wur a lovely kiss.”
The Beatups were naturally indignant at Tom’s decision. To them it
savoured of undue haste, if not of indecency. Courtships in Sunday
Street usually lasted from two to ten years. Indeed, Maudie Speldrum
had been wooed for fifteen years before she took matters into her own
hands and proposed to Bert Pix. Tom had not been engaged to Thyrza
six months. What did they want to get married for? And what was Tom
but a lad?—a mere child in his mother’s eyes—a calf that Mrs. Honey
was leading to market, all ignorant (as she could not be) of what
lay ahead. In Sunday Street, marriage was the end—the end of love,
the end of youth—and mixed with Mrs. Beatup’s jealousy of the other
woman and suspicion of her motives, was the desire to keep her son a
little longer in the frisky meadows of his boyhood before he was led
to those lean pastures she knew so well.
8
About the middle of March, Tom was moved to a convalescent hospital
at Polegate, and a fortnight later sent home. Worge gave him a big
hail, and the whole family, including Thyrza, sat down to a supper
which was supposed to outshine the best efforts of hospital. That
supper was not only a welcome but a farewell. When he had eaten two
more in the muddle of his kin, he would eat a third in quiet, alone
with Thyrza. The few necessary preparations for his marriage had been
made, and the room was booked in Hastings for the third day from now.
His happiness made him dreamy, and also tender towards those he was
to leave, for though he had not realised his mother’s jealousy of
his sweetheart, he vaguely understood that it would hurt her to lose
him, as lose him she must when he went to this other woman’s arms.
So he held her hand under the table oftener and longer than he held
Thyrza’s, and kissed her good night without being asked.
The next day Harry took him to see the spring sowings. They were
finished now, and the chocolate acres lay moist and furrowed in a
muffle of misty April sunshine. Harry, more thickset and sinewy than
of old, tramped a little behind his brother, as a workman after an
inspector, with sidelong glance at Tom’s brown, stubborn profile,
anxious to see if praise or delight could be read there.
Tom was indeed delighted with the fruits of Harry’s industry,
swelling in soft, scored curves from Worge’s southern boundaries at
Forges Wood to the northern limits of the Street. But he was also
aghast.
“You’ll never have the labour to kip and reap this—and you’ve bruk up
grass!”
“I can manage valiant till harvest, and then I’ll git extra hands.
As for the grass, ’twur only an old-fool’s idea that it mun never be
ploughed.”
“And I reckon ’tis a young-fool’s idea to plough it,” said Tom
rebukingly.
“The newspaaper said as grass-lands mun be bruk up now, to maake more
acres.”
“And wot does the paaper know about it?”
“A lot, seemingly.”
“It aun’t lik to know more than men as have worked on the ground all
their lives, and their faathers before ’em. Any farmer ull tell you
as it’s hemmed risky to plough grass.”
“The paaper never said as it wurn’t risky, but it said as farmers
must taake some risks these times, and git good crops fur the
country, and help on the War.”
“Doan’t you go vrothering about the War, youngster. It aun’t no
concern of yourn—and I reckon it woan’t help us Sussex boys much if
our farms go to the auctioneer’s while we’re away.”
“Worge woan’t go to the auctioneer’s. You spik lik faather wud his
faint heart. And a lot of good it’ll do if you chaps beat the Germans
out there and we have to maake peace ’cos we’re starving wud hunger
at home.”
“There’ll be no starving—you taake it from me. We’ll have ’em across
the Rhine in another six months, so ‘kip the home-fires burning till
the lads’ returning, and doan’t go mucking up the farm fur the saake
of a lot of silly stuff you read in the paapers.”
But Harry stuck doggedly to his idea—
“I mun try, Tom—and I’ll never git the plaace sold up, fur we’re
spending naun extra save fur the seed and a bit of manure. I go
unaccountable wary, and do most of the wark myself, wud faather to
help me on his good days, and Juglery and Elphick stuck on jobs
as they can’t do no harm at. It’ll do Worge naun but good in the
end—wheat’s at eighty shilling a quarter, and guaranteed—and anyhow,
I tell you, I mun try.”
Tom was impressed.
“Well, Harry, I woan’t say you aun’t a good lad. But it maakes me
unaccountable narvous. Here have I bin toiling and sweating this five
year jest to kip the farm together, and now you go busting out all
round and saying it ull win the War. Wot if we chaps out there doan’t
win, t’aun’t likely as you will. Howsumdever....”
9
Tom’s marriage was on the Thursday of Easter week. All the morning a
soft teeming fog lay over the fields, drawing out scents of growth
and warmth and life. Worge lay in the midst of it like the ghost of a
farm, a dim grey shadow on the whiteness, and the voices of her men
came muffled, as in dreams. Towards noon the sunshine had begun to
eat away the mist—it grew yellower, streakier, and at last began to
scatter, rolling up the fields in solemn clouds, balling and pilling
itself against the hedges, melting into the April green of the woods;
and then suddenly it was gone—sucked up into the sky, sucked down
into the earth, living only in a few drops in the cups of violets.
The Bethel stared away across the fields to Puddledock. For some
time its roof, with the chipped Georgian pediment, had risen above
the mist. Then the grim windows had come out to stare, and then the
tombstones that grew round its feet, leaning and tottering among the
chapel weed.
Tom and Thyrza were to be married at the Bethel. This had caused
some surprise in the neighbourhood, as the Beatups had always
been “Church”; but friendship and convenience had led to the
decision—friendship for the Reverend Mr. Sumption, because Tom knew
him better than Mr. Poullett-Smith, and was sorry for him on account
of Jerry, convenience because the chapel was close at hand, and the
makers of the wedding breakfast would have time to run across and
witness the ceremony, which they could not have done had it taken
place at Brownbread Street, two miles away.
The only one to whom these reasons seemed inadequate was Nell. To
her the proceeding was not only heretical but mean—her affection
for the Church had always been led by taste rather than belief, and
her attitude, which she had considered (under instruction) as that
of an orthodox Anglican, was in reality that of an Italian peasant,
who looks upon his church as his drawing-room, a place of brightness
to which he can go for refuge from the drabness of every day. Her
opposition to the chapel marriage was based on an emotion similar
to what she would have felt for the party who, with the chance of
eating and drinking out of delicate china in the drawing-room, chose
to devour their food out of broken pots in the scullery. She did not
acknowledge this, any more than she acknowledged the motive which fed
uneasily on Mr. Poullett-Smith’s inevitable disgust; she talked to
Tom about his duty as a Baptized Churchman, and was both surprised
and grieved to find that the War seemed to have destroyed what
little sense of this he had ever had.
“I tell you as it’s all different out there. There aun’t no church
and chapel saum as there is here. You stick to church on Church
Parade down at the base, but when you’re up in the firing line,
there’s a queer kind of religion going around. You hear chaps praying
as if they wur swearing and swearing as if they wur praying, and in
the Y.M. plaace they have sort of holy sing-songs wud priests and
ministers all mixed up; and I’ve heard a Catholic priest read the
English funeral over one of us, and I’ve seen a rosary on a dead
Baptist’s neck. Church and chapel may be all very good for civvies,
but you can’t go vrothering about such things when you’re a soldier.”
Nell was hurt and frightened by these sayings. She had an idea that
any danger or suffering would only make a man cling closer to the
Sanctuary. It was terrible to think that at the first earthquake
Peter’s Rock cracked to its foundations. A defiant loyalty inspired
her, and at first she made up her mind not to go to the wedding, but
she could not resist the temptation of asking Mr. Poullett-Smith’s
advice, and he thought she had better attend, and pray for the
backsliders. He also earnestly bade her distrust any appearance of
cracks in Peter’s Rock, and she went away comforted, with shining
eyes and burning cheeks, and her church standing firmer than ever on
the rock which was neither Peter nor Christ, but her love for a very
ordinary young man.
So all the Beatups went to the Bethel, leaving Worge locked up and
the yard in charge of Elphick. Mrs. Beatup wore her Sunday bonnet,
the wheat-crop having been superseded, contrary to all the laws of
rotation, by one of small green grapes. Both Ivy and Nell had new
gowns, Ivy looking squeezed and unnatural in a sky-blue cloth, which
together with a pair of straight-fronted corsets, she had bought at
a Hastings dress agency—Nell pretty and demure in a grey coat and
skirt, and one of those small towny-looking hats which seemed to
find their way to her head alone in all Dallington. Mus’ Beatup,
with Harry and Zacky, smelled strongly of hair-oil and moth-killer,
and Harry had nearly scrubbed his skin off in his efforts to get
out of it the earth of his new furrows. He was considered too young
to be Tom’s best man, and the office had been at the last moment
unexpectedly filled by Bill Putland. Bill, now a sergeant, was home
on seven days’ leave, looking very brown and smart, and Polly Sinden,
who, not having been invited with her parents to the breakfast, had
vowed she would waste no time going to the chapel, suddenly changed
her mind and appeared in her most ceremonial hat.
The chapel was packed with Sindens, Bourners, Putlands, Hubbles,
Viners, Kadwells, Pixes. Mrs. Lamb of Bucksteep was there, with
Miss Marian, but as she had not thought it necessary to put on the
elegant clothes in which she was seen gliding into church on Sundays,
her presence was regarded as an affront rather than an honour; Mrs.
Beatup would have dressed herself in her best for any Bucksteep
wedding, and thought that the squire’s wife might have done the same
for her. Also, she came in very late, and her entrance was mistaken
for that of the bride by many folk, who shot up out of the pew-boxes,
only to be disappointed by the sight of Mrs. Lamb’s faded, powdered
features behind a spotted veil, and Miss Marian swinging along after
her with a tread like a policeman. “I reckon my feet are smaller than
hers,” thought Nell, “for all that I’m only a farmer’s daughter.”
Then Mr. Sumption came out of the vestry, and stood under the pulpit
to wait for the bride. He looked more like a figure of cursing than
of blessing—black as a rook, with his thick curly hair falling into
his eyes, yet not quite hiding the furrows which the plough of care
had dragged across his forehead. There was a rustle and a flutter and
a turning of heads, as Thyrza came up the aisle on the arm of the
bachelor cousin who was giving her away. She wore a grey gown like
a March cloud, and carried a bunch of flowers, and the congregation
whispered when they saw that she had sleeked her feathery hair with
water, so that it lay smooth behind her ears, which were round and
pink like those of mice. “It didn’t look like Thyrza,” everyone
said—and perhaps that was why Tom was so loutishly nervous, and
nearly broke Bill Putland’s heart with his fumblings and stutterings.
Thyrza was nervous too, her head drooped like an over-blown rose upon
its stalk, and Mr. Sumption’s manner was not of the kind that soothes
and reassures. He shouted at the bride and bridegroom, and “thumped
at” various members of the congregation who whispered or (later in
the proceedings) yawned. He was not often asked to officiate at
weddings, and had apparently decided to make the most of this one,
for he wound up with an address to the married pair so lengthy and
apocalyptic that Mrs. Beatup became anxious as to the fate of a
pudding she had left to “cook itself,” and rising noisily in her pew
creaked out through a silence weighted with doom. “And whosoever
hath not a wedding garment,” the minister shouted after her, “shall
be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing
of teeth”—for which Mrs. Beatup never forgave him, as she had spent
nearly three shillings on retrimming her bonnet, “and if her cape
wurn’t good enough fur him, she reckoned he’d never seen a better on
the gipsy-woman’s back.”
The service came to an end at last, and the congregation pushed
after the bride to see her get into the cab drawn by a pair of
seedy greys, which would take her the few yards from the chapel to
the farm. The breakfast was to be at Worge, for Thyrza had no kin
besides the bachelor cousin, and it was considered more fitting
that her husband’s family should undertake the social and domestic
duties of the occasion. The feast was spread in the kitchen, which
had been decorated with flags, lent for the afternoon from the
club-room of the Rifle Volunteer. The unsugared wedding-cake was a
terrible humiliation to Mrs. Beatup, who felt sure that, in spite
of her repeated explanations, everyone would put it down to poverty
and meanness instead of to the tyranny of “Govunmunt.” However, she
had restored the balance of her self-respect by providing wine (at
eighteen-pence the bottle).
There was much laughter and good-humour and the wit proper to
weddings as the guests squeezed themselves round the table. Even Mr.
Sumption’s five-minute grace, in which he approvingly mentioned more
than one dish on the table, but added to his score with Mrs. Beatup
by referring to the wine as poison and “the forerunner of thirst in
hell,” was only a temporary blight. The bride and bridegroom alone
looked subdued, their sleek heads drooping together, their hands
nervously crumbling their food—also Ivy, who was heard to say in a
hoarse whisper to Nell, “If I can’t go somewheres and taake my stays
off I shall bust.” However, in time she forgot her constriction in
flirting with Thyrza’s bachelor cousin, who had pale blue eyes,
bulging out as if in vain effort to catch sight of a receding chin,
and was exempt by reason of ruptured hernia from military service.
The usual healths were drunk, and the sight of other people
drinking—for he himself would take only water—seemed to intoxicate
Mr. Sumption, and he forgot the cares that had made his black hair
as ashes on his head—his sleepless anxiety for Jerry, and the crying
in him of that day which shall burn the stubble—and became merry
as a corn-fed colt, laughing with all his big white teeth, and
paying iron-shod compliments to Thyrza and Ivy and Nell, and even
Mrs. Beatup, who maintained, however, an impressive indifference.
Bill Putland made the principal speech of the afternoon, and looked
so smart and handsome, with his hair in a soaring quiff and a
trench-ring on each hand, that Ivy might have plotted to substitute
his arm for Ern Honey’s round her waist, if she had not been too
experienced to fail to realise that he was about the only man in
Dallington she could not win with her floppy charms.
In the end all was cheerful incoherence, and just as the sunshine was
losing its heat on the yard-stones, the bride and bridegroom rose to
go away. A trap from the Volunteer would drive them to the station,
and they climbed into it through a flying rainbow of confetti, which
stuck in Thyrza’s loosening hair, and spotted her dim gown with
colours.
Amidst cheering and laughter the old horse lurched off, and soon
Thyrza’s grey and Tom’s dun were blurred together in the distance,
which was already staining with purple as the air thickened towards
the twilight. The guests turned back into the house, or scattered
over fields and footpaths. Ivy rushed upstairs to take off her stays,
and Bill Putland swaggered home between his parents, with a flower
in his button-hole and plans in his heart for an evening at Little
Worge. The Reverend Mr. Sumption went off with Bourner to the smithy.
The blacksmith had a shoeing and clipping to do, and the minister
would sit and watch him in the red, hoof-smelling warmth, and lend
an experienced hand if occasion needed. Mus’ Beatup, his tongue all
sour with the Australian wine, took advantage of the general flit
to creep along the hedge to the Rifle Volunteer, there to wait for
the magic stroke of six and unlocking of his paradise. Mrs. Beatup
was the last to leave the doorstep. She thought she could hear the
old horse clopping on the East Road, and when her eyes no longer
helped her to follow her son, she used her ears. She remembered that
earlier occasion when she had gone with him to the end of the drive
and kissed him there. He had wanted her then; he did not want her
now—his good-bye kiss had been kind yet perfunctory. Another woman
had him—a woman who had never suffered pain or discomfort or anxiety
or privation for his sake. Yet her jealousy had unexpectedly died.
Somehow, to-day, all that she had suffered for Tom when she bore
him, nursed him, reared him and bred him, seemed a sufficient reward
in itself. Her sufferings had made him what he was, and this other
woman took only what she, his mother, had made. “She never went
heavy wud him, nor bore him in pain, nor lay awaake at night wud his
screeching, nor thought as he’d die when he cut his teeth, nor went
all skeered when he took the fever.... So thur aun’t no sense in
vrothering. Reckon he’ll always be more mine nor hers, even if I am
never to set eyes on him agaun.”
10
Tom and Thyrza came back from Hastings in a few days. They talked as
if they had been away for weeks, and indeed it had seemed weeks to
them—not that any moment had faltered or dragged, but each had held
the delight of hours, and each hour had been a day of new wonder.
Perhaps the dazzle was brightest for Tom—Thyrza could remember an
earlier honeymoon, which had held no presage of darkness to follow,
and she slipped back pretty easily into the old habit of having a man
about her; but for Tom even the traces of her here and there in the
room, her hat thrown down, her petticoat trailing over a chair, the
dim scent of clover that hung on her pillow, making her bed like a
field, all joined to bind him with her enchantment, to drug him with
an ecstasy which had its sweet foundation in the commonplace.
When they came back to Sunday Street the honeymoon did not end.
Contrariwise, it seemed to wax fuller in the freedom of the old ways.
Even sweeter than the sense of passionate holiday was the taking
up of a common life together, the daily sharing of food and work
and rest, the doing of things he had done a hundred times before,
but never like this. Thyrza’s little cottage had been hung with new
curtains, and some unknown hand—which afterwards unexpectedly proved
to be Nell’s—had filled it with flowers on the evening of their
return. Bunches of primroses, violets and bluebells stuffed the vases
in bedroom and parlour, and the soft fugitive scent of April banks
mixed with the scent of lath and plaster which haunts old cottages,
and the more spicy, powdery smells of the shop.
The days were warm and drowsy, and the fields lay in a muffle of
sunshine, their distances all blurred with heat. Round every farm
the orchards rolled in pink-stained clouds of bloom, and the young
wheat was green as a rainy sunset. The wind that brought the mutter
of the guns, brought also the bleating of lambs from the pastures;
scents seemed to hang and brood on the air, or drift slowly from the
woods—scents of standing water and budding thorn, of hazel leaves hot
in the sun, and soft mixed fragrances of gorse and fern, of cows, of
baking earth, of currant bushes in cottage gardens....
Towards evening Tom and Thyrza usually closed the shop, and came
out—either for a stroll up to Worge to see his family, or for some
more adventurous excursion to Brownbread Street, or Furnacefield,
or up to the North Road and the straggle of old Dallington. They
had one or two quite long walks, for a new enterprise had kindled
in them both, and for the first time there was mystery and allure
in some shaky signpost at the throws, or a little lane creeping off
secretly. One day they walked as far as Brightling, past the obelisk,
through the shuttling dimness of Pipers Wood and up Twelve Oaks Hill
by strange farms to the sudden clump of Brightling among the trees.
They went into the churchyard where the yews spread shadows nearly
as dark as their own blackness and strange white peacocks perched on
the tombstones, with shrill, unnatural cries. There was also a huge
cone-shaped object, built of damp stones and thickly grown with moss,
and Thyrza unaccountably took fright at this, and the peacocks, and
the shadows and the trees, and walked for most of the way home with
her head under Tom’s coat.
He did not often think of when this time should end, of the day that
crept nearer and nearer to him over drowsing twilights and magical,
green sunrises. He knew that a month hence all this delight would
be a memory, that between him and the spurge-thickening fields of
May would lie all the life of ugly adventure into which fate had
pitched him—and Thyrza would come to him only on scraps of paper, in
puffs of scent, in fugitive dreams, in a passing light in some other
girl’s eyes.... But he was too simple and too happy to let thoughts
of the future spoil the present, besides, his habit of disregarding
the future now stood his friend. He would not see the clover in
bloom, but saw it in the green—deep, rippling, gleaming, like the
sea—he would miss the hay, but now he could see the buttercups under
the moon, so yellow that they seemed to paint the sky and turn the
moon to honey; Thyrza might in a month’s time be a memory, belong to
phantasy, but now she was a woman solid and close, his woman, the
maker of his home, the maker of himself anew.... Once his mother had
borne him, and now it seemed as if this woman had borne him again,
into a new experience, a new happiness, a new wonder—so perfect
and complete that sometimes he almost felt as if it did not matter
whether he held it for ever or for a day.
11
On his last evening, he went up to Worge to say good-bye. He felt
already as if he did not belong to the place. Harry’s drastic
dealings with the tilth seemed to have taken the fields away
from him—he no longer felt even a distant guardianship of those
brown-ribbed acres which had been green when he worked on them. He
felt, too, with a sense of estrangement, the dirt and litter of the
house, the muddling business which at six o’clock had Ivy swilling
out the scullery and Mrs. Beatup still struggling with the washing.
Thyrza never did a stroke of housework after dinner, and yet her
morning’s tasks were never hurried; she never had Ivy’s flushed, red
face and tousled hair, or Mrs. Beatup’s forehead shiny with sweat.
His family were conscious of this—conscious that he now had a
standard of comparison by which to measure their short-comings, and
it made them sulkily suspicious in their attitude. He was already the
alien—the bird that has left the nest, the puppy that has grown up
and gone a-hunting on his own. But this sense of estrangement only
seemed to make his parting sadder, for he vaguely felt as if he had
left them before he need, had already divided himself from them by an
earlier good-bye, of which this was only the echo and the ghost.
Mrs. Beatup enquired politely after Thyrza, and sent Ivy out to fetch
in the others. Zacky climbed on Tom’s knee and asked him to send him
home a German helmet, and Harry—whose heart was really very warm and
loving towards Tom—stood shyly behind his chair and could not speak a
word. Mus’ Beatup gave Tom an account of the Battle of the Ancre, but
failed to create the usual respectful impression.
“You see, faather, I was out there, and I know that it happened
different. St. Quentin aun’t anywhere near the Rhine.”
“There’s more’n one St. Quentin, saum as there’s more’n one
Mockbeggar, and more’n one Iden Green. How do you know as there’s no
St. Quentin on the Rhine? You’ve never bin there, and you’ll never be
there, nuther.”
“I reckon I’ll be there before I’m many months older.”
“You woan’t,” said Mus’ Beatup solemnly, “it’s more likely as the
Germans ull be crossing the River Cuckmere than as you’ll ever be
crossing the River Rhine. Now, be quiet, Nell, and a-done do, fur I
tell you it’s bin proved as we’ll never git to the River Rhine, so
where’s the sense of going on wud the war, I’d like to know?”
“To prevent the Germans crossing the River Cuckmere,” snapped Nell.
“Oh, doan’t go talking such tar’ble stuff,” moaned Mrs. Beatup. “If
the Germans caum here I’d die of fits.”
“They woan’t come here,” said her husband, “and we’ll never git
there, so wot’s the sense of all this vrother, and giving up our lads
and ploughing up our grass and going short of beer, all to end where
we started? If this war had bin a-going to do us any good, it ud
a-done it before now, surelye; but it’s a lousy, tedious, lamentaable
war, and the sooner we git shut of it the better.”
“Well, I must be going,” said Tom, standing up. He felt rather angry
with his father, who, he thought, talked like a “conscientious
objector,” and was prostrating his mighty intellect to base uses.
“But maybe the beer has addled him—he’s had a regular souse this
winter, by his looks.”
He said good-bye to the family, refusing his mother’s invitation to
stay to supper, as he had promised to take Thyrza for a walk that
evening. However, he asked her to come with him to the door, as there
was something he wanted to say to her alone.
Mrs. Beatup felt pleased at this mark of confidence, but all Tom had
to say as he kissed her on the threshold was—
“Mother, if anything wur to happen to me ... out there, you know ...
you’d be good to Thyrza?”
“Oh, Tom—you aun’t expecting aught?”
“I hope not, surelye—but how am I to know?”
Her face wrinkled for crying.
“You didn’t use to spik lik that....”
“Come, mother—be sensible. There aun’t no sense spikking different,
things being wot they are. I dudn’t use to be married ... it’s being
married that maakes a chap think of wot might happen.”
“You’d want me to taake Thyrza to live here?...”
“Reckon I wouldn’t. She’ll have her liddle bit of money, thank God,
and maybe a pension besides. It aun’t money as I’m thinking of—it’s
just—it’s just as she’ll break her heart.”
“And I’ll break mine, too, I reckon.”
Tom groaned.
“You’re a valiant help to me, mother. I ask you a thing to maake me a
bit easier, and all you do is to vrother me the more.”
“Doan’t you go abusing your mother, Tom—wud your last breath. If
Thyrza’s heart gits broke I’ll give her a bit of mine to mend it
with—but no good ever caum of talking of such things.”
“I woan’t talk of them no more. Only, it had to be done—you see,
mother, there might be a little ’un as well as Thyrza....”
“Oh, Tom, a liddle baby fur you!”
He blushed—“There aun’t no knowing, and I’d be easier if....”
“Oh, but I’d justabout love a liddle grandchild. You need never fret
over that, Tom. I’d give my days to a liddle young un of yourn.”
He kissed her, and they parted in love.
12
He hurried back to Thyrza, and they shut up the shop, and went out to
the field by the willow pond. A green, still dusk lay over the fields
and sky; no stars were out yet, but the chalky moon hung low over
the woods of Burntkitchen. The distant guns were silent, only the
bleating of lambs came from the Trulilows, and every now and then a
burst of liquid, trilling, sucking melody from a blackbird among the
willows.
“Hark to the bird,” said Thyrza.
“Maybe he’s got a nest full of liddle ’uns.”
“And a liddle wife as can’t sing—funny how hen-birds never sing, Tom.”
“Thyrza, I wish as I cud maake a home fur you, dear.”
“Wotever maakes you think of that? The birds’ nest? Reckon I’ve got a
dentical liddle home.”
“But it’s wot you’ve always lived in. I never built it for you.”
“Doan’t you go fretting over that. I’d be lonesome wudout the shop,
Tom—I doan’t think as I’ll ever want to be wudout the shop. And we’ve
bin so happy there together. It’s saum as if you’d built it fur me,
since you’ve maade it wot it never was before.”
He drew her close to him, sleek, soft, heavy, like a little cat, and
leaned his cheek against her hair.
“Reckon I’ll always think of you in it.... I’ll see you setting up in
the mornun wud your eyes all blinky and your hair streaming down—and
I’ll see you putting on the kettle and dusting the shop, and maybe
having a bit of talk over the counter wud a luckier chap than me.
And all the day through I’ll see you, and in the swale you’ll be
putting your head out for a blow of air, and there’ll be the lamp in
the window behind you ... and then you’ll lie asleep, and the room
ull be all moony and grey, and your liddle hand ull lie out on the
blanket—so, and your breath ull come lik the scent out of the grass
... and when you turn your body it’ll be lik the grass moving in the
wind—and I woan’t be there to see or hear or touch or smell you.”
His arm tightened round her breast, and she leaned against him as if
she would fuse her body into his, share its travels, hardships and
dangers. The stars were creeping slowly into the sky, dim and rayless
in the thick Spring night, which had put a purple haze into the
zenith, and made the great moon glow like a copper pan. The fields
were blooming with a soft yellow—the waters of the pond had a faint
gleam on their stagnation, and the willows were like smoke with a
fire in its heart, their boughs pouring down in misty grey towards
the water, with points and sparks of light here and there, as the
radiance danced among their leaves.
The swell of the field against the eastern constellations was broken
by the gable of the shop, rising over the hedge and pointing to the
sign of the Ram. Tom’s England—the England he would carry in his
heart—had widened to take in that little humped roof of moss-grown
tiles. It held not only the willow pond and the woman beside it,
but the home where together they had eaten the bread and drunk the
cup of common things. It was not perhaps a very lofty conception of
fatherland—not even so high as Harry’s conception of a country saved
by his plough. Tom’s country was only a little field-corner that held
his wife and his home, but as he sat there under the stars, he felt
in his vague, humble way, that it was a country a man would choose to
fight for, and for which perhaps he would not be unwilling to die.