BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good things. It
suddenly had become worth while to discuss the approaching hop harvest
and the yearly influx of the hop pickers from London. Yesterday the
subject had appeared discouraging enough. The great hop gardens of the
estate had been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural
revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county. The neglect
and scant food of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each
season they had needed smaller bands of “hoppers,” and their standard
had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as
of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote
reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view.
Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application
of all available resource to one end produce appreciable results? The
idea presented itself in the form of a thing worth thinking of.
“It would provide an outlook and give one work to do,” he put it to his
companion. “To have a roof over one's head, a sound body, and work to
do, is not so bad. Such things form the whole of G. Selden's cheerful
aim. His spirit is alight within me. I will walk over and talk to
Bolter.”
Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost too much
for him. Holdings whose owners, either through neglect or lack of money,
have failed to do their duty as landlords in the matter of repairs of
farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and other things, gradually fall into
poor hands. Resourceful and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands
under unprosperous landlords. There were farms lying vacant on the Mount
Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were uncertain rent
payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways. Waste or sale
of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its due,
neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property
and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties. But Mount Dunstan knew
that if he turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly
frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield Rise would
stand empty for many a year. But for his poverty Bolter would have been
a good tenant enough. He was in trouble now because, though his hops
promised well, he faced difficulties in the matter of “pickers.” Last
year he had not been able to pay satisfactory prices in return for
labour, and as a result the prospect of securing good workers was an
unpromising one.
The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after year to
the hop-growing districts know each other. They learn also which may
be called the good neighbourhoods and which the bad; the gardens whose
holders are considered satisfactory as masters, and those who are
undesirable. They know by experience or report where the best “huts” are
provided, where tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one
can.
Generally the regular flocks are under a “captain,” who gathers his
followers each season, manages them and looks after their interests and
their employers'. In some cases the same captain brings his regiment to
the same gardens year after year, and ends by counting himself as of the
soil and almost of the family of his employer. Each hard, thick-fogged
winter they fight through in their East End courts and streets, they
look forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow green
groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh
and pungent-scented hop clusters. Children play “'oppin” in dingy rooms
and alleys, and talk to each other of days when the sun shone hot and
birds were singing and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of
others when the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and
yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer in the fire
of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who hung over it a
tin kettle to boil for tea. They never forgot the gentry they had caught
sight of riding or driving by on the road, the parson who came to talk,
and the occasional groups of ladies from the “great house” who came into
the gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer questions
in their gentry-sounding voices. They never knew anything, and they
always seemed to be entertained. Sometimes there were enterprising,
laughing ones, who asked to be shown how to strip the hops into the
bins, and after being shown played at the work for a little while,
taking off their gloves and showing white fingers with rings on. They
always looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their
clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near them it
was observable that they smelt nice. Generally they gave pennies to the
children before they left the garden, and sometimes shillings to the
women. The hop picking was, in fact, a wonderful blend of work and
holiday combined.
Mount Dunstan had liked the “hopping” from his first memories of it. He
could recall his sensations of welcoming a renewal of interesting things
when, season after season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on
the road. The stragglers were not of the class gathered under captains.
They were derelicts--tramps who spent their summers on the highways and
their winters in such workhouses as would take them in; tinkers, who
differ from the tramps only because sometimes they owned a rickety cart
full of strange household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators
piled with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust or
worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside fire stirring
the battered pot or tending the battered kettle, when resting time had
come and food must be cooked. Gipsies there were who had cooking fires
also, and hobbled horses cropping the grass. Now and then appeared a
grand one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who
came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During the late
summer weeks one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high
road at intervals. These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged
and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed,
weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy
beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily,
or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these
were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers
were wanted. They were the forerunners of the regular army.
On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed
two or three of these strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam,
but on the roadside near a hop garden he came upon a group of an aspect
so unusual that it attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in
its air of exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of
the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an evidently long
tramp, might well have been expected to look forlorn, discouraged, and
out of spirits. A slouching father of five children, one plainly but
a few weeks old, and slung in a dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an
unhealthy looking slattern mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled
with dingy bundles and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest
girl unpacking things and keeping an eye at the same time on the two
youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady on their
feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching father to build
the wayside fire. The mother sat upon the grass nursing her baby and
staring about her with an expression at once stupefied and illuminated
by some temporary bliss. Even the slouching father was grinning, as if
good luck had befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about
with squeals of good cheer. This was not the humour in which such a
group usually dropped wearily on the grass at the wayside to eat its
meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging limbs. As he drew near,
Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman's side there stood a basket full of
food and a can full of milk.
Ordinarily he would have passed on, but, perhaps because of the human
glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke.
“Have you come for the hopping?” he asked.
The man touched his forehead, apparently not conscious that the grin was
yet on his face.
“Yes, sir,” he answered.
“How far have you walked?”
“A good fifty miles since we started, sir. It took us a good bit. We was
pretty done up when we stopped here. But we've 'ad a wonderful piece of
good luck.” And his grin broadened immensely.
“I am glad to hear that,” said Mount Dunstan. The good luck was plainly
of a nature to have excited them greatly. Chance good luck did not
happen to people like themselves. They were in the state of mind which
in their class can only be relieved by talk. The woman broke in, her
weak mouth and chin quite unsteady.
“Seems like it can't be true, sir,” she said. “I'd only just come out
of the Union--after this one,” signifying the new baby at her breast. “I
wasn't fit to drag along day after day. We 'ad to stop 'ere 'cos I was
near fainting away.”
“She looked fair white when she sat down,” put in the man. “Like she was
goin' off.”
“And that very minute,” said the woman, “a young lady came by on
'orseback, an' the minute she sees me she stops her 'orse an' gets
down.”
“I never seen nothing like the quick way she done it,” said the husband.
“Sharp, like she was a soldier under order. Down an' give the bridle to
the groom an' comes over.”
“And kneels down,” the woman took him up, “right by me an' says, 'What's
the matter? What can I do?' an' finds out in two minutes an' sends to
the farm for some brandy an' all this basketful of stuff,” jerking her
head towards the treasure at her side. “An' gives 'IM,” with another
jerk towards her mate, “money enough to 'elp us along till I'm fair
on my feet. That quick it was--that quick,” passing her hand over
her forehead, “as if it wasn't for the basket,” with a nervous,
half-hysteric giggle, “I wouldn't believe but what it was a dream--I
wouldn't.”
“She was a very kind young lady,” said Mount Dunstan, “and you were in
luck.”
He gave a few coppers to the children and strode on his way. The glow
was hot in his heart, and he held his head high.
“She has gone by,” he said. “She has gone by.”
He knew he should find her at West Ways Farm, and he did so. Slim and
straight as a young birch tree, and elate with her ride in the morning
air, she stood silhouetted in her black habit against the ancient
whitewashed brick porch as she talked to Bolter.
“I have been drinking a glass of milk and asking questions about hops,”
she said, giving him her hand bare of glove. “Until this year I have
never seen a hop garden or a hop picker.”
After the exchange of a few words Bolter respectfully melted away and
left them together.
“It was such a wonderful day that I wanted to be out under the sky for
a long time--to ride a long way,” she explained. “I have been looking at
hop gardens as I rode. I have watched them all the summer--from the time
when there was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves
looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely tall
hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it--as if it was
saying over and over again, under its breath, 'Can I get up there? Can
I get up? Can I do it in time? Can I do it in time?' Yes, that was
what they were saying, the little bold things. I have watched them ever
since, putting out tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and
climbing like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding leaves
and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they were
beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue of the sky
if the summer were long enough. And now, look at them!” her hand waved
towards the great gardens. “Forests of them, cool green pathways and
avenues with leaf canopies over them.”
“You have seen it all,” he said. “You do see things, don't you? A few
hundred yards down the road I passed something you had seen. I knew it
was you who had seen it, though the poor wretches had not heard your
name.”
She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in her hand a bit
of pebbled earth from the pathway. There was storm in the blue of
her eyes as she held it out for him to look at as it lay on the bare
rose-flesh of her palm.
“See,” she said, “see, it is like that--what we give. It is like that.”
And she tossed the earth away.
“It does not seem like that to those others.”
“No, thank God, it does not. But to one's self it is the mere luxury of
self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes tempts one to
be even a trifle morbid. Don't you see,” a sudden thrill in her voice
startled him, “they are on the roadside everywhere all over the world.”
“Yes. All over the world.”
“Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article about the
suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were obviously to blame
for every starved sob and cry. It almost drove me out of my childish
senses. I went to my father and threw myself into his arms in a violent
fit of crying. I clung to him and sobbed out, 'Let us give it all away;
let us give it all away and be like other people!'”
“What did he say?”
“He said we could never be quite like other people. We had a certain
load to carry along the highway. It was the thing the whole world wanted
and which we ourselves wanted as much as the rest, and we could not
sanely throw it away. It was my first lesson in political economy and
I abhorred it. I was a passionate child and beat furiously against the
stone walls enclosing present suffering. It was horrible to know that
they could not be torn down. I cried out, 'When I see anyone who is
miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything he
wants--everything!' I was ten years old, and thought it could be done.”
“But you stop by the roadside even now.”
“Yes. That one can do.”
“You are two strong creatures and you draw each other,” Penzance had
said. “Perhaps you drew each other across seas. Who knows?”
Coming to West Ways on a chance errand he had, as it were, found
her awaiting him on the threshold. On her part she had certainly not
anticipated seeing him there, but--when one rides far afield in the
sun there are roads towards which one turns as if answering a summoning
call, and as her horse had obeyed a certain touch of the rein at a
certain point her cheek had felt momentarily hot.
Until later, when the “picking” had fairly begun, the kilns would not be
at work; but there was some interest even now in going over the ground
for the first time.
“I have never been inside an oast house,” she said; “Bolter is going to
show me his, and explain technicalities.”
“May I come with you?” he asked.
There was a change in him. Something had lighted in his eyes since the
day before, when he had told her his story of Red Godwyn. She wondered
what it was. They went together over the place, escorted by Bolter. They
looked into the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be
laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper room where,
when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light piles, until pushed
with wooden shovels into the long “pokes” to be pressed and packed
into a solid marketable mass. Bolter was allowed to explain the
technicalities, but it was plain that Mount Dunstan was familiar with
all of them, and it was he who, with a sentence here and there, gave her
the colour of things.
“When it is being done there is nearly always outside a touch of the
sharp sweetness of early autumn,” he said “The sun slanting through the
little window falls on the pale yellow heaps, and there is a pungent
scent of hops in the air which is rather intoxicating.”
“I am coming later to see the entire process,” she answered.
It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and exchanging
common speech concerning them, but each was so strongly conscious of
the other that no sentence could seem wholly impersonal. There are
times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose intensity seems a
reason for all things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound of
a voice makes an unreasonable joy.
“There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the air yesterday
morning,” she said. “And the chaplets of briony berries that look as if
they had been thrown over the hedges are beginning to change to scarlet
here and there. The wild rose-haws are reddening, and so are the
clusters of berries on the thorn trees and bushes.”
“There are millions of them,” Mount Dunstan said, “and in a few weeks'
time they will look like bunches of crimson coral. When the sun shines
on them they will be wonderful to see.”
What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two nearer and
nearer to each other as they walked side by side--to fill the morning
air with an intensity of life, to seem to cause the world to drop away
and become as nothing? As they had been isolated during their waltz in
the crowded ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now. When
they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking simply
of the placing of the bins and the stripping and measuring of the vines,
there might have been no human thing within a hundred miles--within a
thousand. For the first time his height and strength conveyed to her an
impression of physical beauty. His walk and bearing gave her pleasure.
When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she was conscious
that she liked their colour, their shape, the power of the look in them.
On his part, he--for the twentieth time--found himself newly moved by
the dower nature had bestowed on her. Had the world ever held before a
woman creature so much to be longed for?--abnormal wealth, New York and
Fifth Avenue notwithstanding, a man could only think of folding arms
round her and whispering in her lovely ear--follies, oaths, prayers,
gratitude.
And yet as they went about together there was growing in Betty
Vanderpoel's mind a certain realisation. It grew in spite of the
recognition of the change in him--the new thing lighted in his eyes.
Whatsoever he felt--if he felt anything--he would never allow himself
speech. How could he? In his place she could not speak herself. Because
he was the strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to
any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the nature of
things, she must take up. And suddenly she comprehended that the mere
obstinate Briton in him--even apart from greater things--had an immense
attraction for her. As she liked now the red-brown colour of his
eyes and saw beauty in his rugged features, so she liked his British
stubbornness and the pride which would not be beaten.
“It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their battles and
makes them bear any horror rather than give in. They have taken half the
world with it; they are like bulldogs and lions,” she thought. “And--and
I am glorying in it.”
“Do you know,” said Mount Dunstan, “that sometimes you suddenly fling
out the most magnificent flag of colour--as if some splendid flame of
thought had sent up a blaze?”
“I hope it is not a habit,” she answered. “When one has a splendid flare
of thought one should be modest about it.”
What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent together?
Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a mere passing by.
But each left something with the other and each learned something; and
the record made was deep.
At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the white gate.
“This morning has been so much to the good,” he said. “I had thought
that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this year. I shall become
absorbed in hops and you will no doubt go away. You will make visits or
go to the Riviera--or to New York for the winter?”
“I do not know yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the thorn trees
load themselves with coral.” To herself she was saying: “He means to
keep away. I shall not see him.”
As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments, not moving from
his place. At a short distance from the farmhouse gate a side lane
opened upon the highway, and as she cantered in its direction a horseman
turned in from it--a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well
a spirited animal. He came out upon the road almost face to face with
Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount Dunstan could see his
delighted smile as he lifted his hat in salute. It was Lord Westholt,
and what more natural than that after an exchange of greetings the two
should ride together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward
road would be the same.
But in a breath's space Mount Dunstan realised a certain truth--a
simple, elemental thing. All the exaltation of the morning swooped and
fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall through space. It was all
over and done with, and he understood it. His normal awakening in the
morning, the physical and mental elation of the first clear hours, the
spring of his foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning.
In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had formed
itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had been. Some
insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite
of him and had set all his waking being in tune to it. That was the
explanation of his undue spirits and hope. If Penzance had spoken a
truth he would have had a natural, sane right to feel all this and more.
But the truth was that he, in his guise--was one of those who are “on
the roadside everywhere--all over the world.” Poetically figurative as
the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.
So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful
diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went back to talk to
Bolter.