I
If any one were to get up about half-past five on an August morning and
look out of an eastern window in the country, he would see the distant
trees almost hidden by a white mist. The tops of the larger groups of
elms would appear above it, and by these the line of the hedgerows
could be traced. Tier after tier they stretch along, rising by degrees
on a gentle slope, the space between filled with haze. Whether there
were corn-fields or meadows under this white cloud he could not tell--a
cloud that might have come down from the sky, leaving it a clear azure.
This morning haze means intense heat in the day. It is hot already,
very hot, for the sun is shining with all his strength, and if you wish
the house to be cool it is time to set the sunblinds.
Roger, the reaper, had slept all night in the cowhouse, lying on the
raised platform of narrow planks put up for cleanliness when the cattle
were there. He had set the wooden window wide open and left the door
ajar when he came stumbling in overnight, long after the late swallows
had settled in their nests in the beams, and the bats had wearied of
moth catching. One of the swallows twittered a little, as much as to
say to his mate, "my love, it is only a reaper, we need not be afraid,"
and all was silence and darkness. Roger did not so much as take off his
boots, but flung himself on the boards crash, curled himself up
hedgehog fashion with some old sacks, and immediately began to breathe
heavily. He had no difficulty in sleeping, first because his muscles
had been tried to the utmost, and next because his skin was full to the
brim, not of jolly "good ale and old" but of the very smallest and
poorest of wish-washy beer. In his own words, it "blowed him up till he
very nigh bust." Now the great authorities on dyspepsia, so eagerly
studied by the wealthy folk whose stomachs are deranged, tell us that a
very little flatulence will make the heart beat irregularly and cause
the most distressing symptoms.
Roger had swallowed at least a gallon of a liquid chemically designed,
one might say, on purpose to utterly upset the internal economy.
Harvest beer is probably the vilest drink in the world. The men say it
is made by pouring muddy water into empty casks returned sour from use,
and then brushing them round and round inside with a besom. This liquid
leaves a stickiness on the tongue and a harsh feeling at the back of
the mouth which soon turns to thirst, so that having once drunk a pint
the drinker must go on drinking. The peculiar dryness caused by this
beer is not like any other throat drought--worse than dust, or heat, or
thirst from work; there is no satisfying it. With it there go down the
germs of fermentation, a sour, yeasty, and, as it were, secondary
fermentation; not that kind which is necessary to make beer, but the
kind that unmakes and spoils beer. It is beer rotting and decomposing
in the stomach. Violent diarrhoea often follows, and then the
exhaustion thus caused induces the men to drink more in order to regain
the strength necessary to do their work. The great heat of the sun and
the heat of hard labour, the strain and perspiration, of course try the
body and weaken the digestion. To distend the stomach with half a
gallon of this liquor, expressly compounded to ferment, is about the
most murderous thing a man could do--murderous because it exposes him
to the risk of sunstroke. So vile a drink there is not elsewhere in the
world; arrack, and potato-spirit, and all the other killing extracts of
the distiller are not equal to it. Upon this abominable mess the golden
harvest of English fields is gathered in.
Some people have in consequence endeavoured to induce the harvesters to
accept a money payment in place of beer, and to a certain extent
successfully. Even then, however, they must drink something. Many
manage on weak tea after a fashion, but not so well as the abstainers
would have us think. Others have brewed for their men a miserable stuff
in buckets, an infusion of oatmeal, and got a few to drink it; but
English labourers will never drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid
to do it. If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made
for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they
see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by
yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a
present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their
families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural
history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull--jovial
John Bull--offering his men a bucket of oatmeal liquor is not a
pleasant one. Such a John Bull ought to be ashamed of himself.
The truth is the English farmer's man was and is, and will be, a
drinker of beer. Neither tea, nor oatmeal, nor vinegar and water
(coolly recommended by indoor folk) will do for him. His natural
constitution rebels against such "peevish" drink. In winter he wants
beer against the cold and the frosty rime and the heavy raw mist that
hangs about the hollows; in spring and autumn against the rain, and in
summer to support him under the pressure of additional work and
prolonged hours. Those who really wish well to the labourer cannot do
better than see that he really has beer to drink--real beer, genuine
brew of malt and hops, a moderate quantity of which will supply force
to his thews and sinews, and will not intoxicate or injure. If by
giving him a small money payment in lieu of such large quantities you
can induce him to be content with a little, so much the better. If an
employer followed that plan, and at the same time once or twice a day
sent out a moderate supply of genuine beer as a gift to his men, he
would do them all the good in the world, and at the same time obtain
for himself their goodwill and hearty assistance, that hearty work
which is worth so much.
Roger breathed heavily in his sleep in the cowhouse, because the vile
stuff he had taken puffed him up and obstructed nature. The tongue in
his open mouth became parched and cracked, swollen and dry; he slept
indeed, but he did not rest; he groaned heavily at times and rolled
aside. Once he awoke choking--he could not swallow, his tongue was so
dry and large; he sat up, swore, and again lay down. The rats in the
sties had already discovered that a man slept in the cowhouse, a place
they rarely visited, as there was nothing there to eat; how they found
it out no one knows. They are clever creatures, the despised rats. They
came across in the night and looked under his bed, supposing that he
might have eaten his bread-and-cheese for supper there, and that
fragments might have dropped between the boards. There were none. They
mounted the boards and sniffed round him; they would have stolen the
food from his very pocket if it had been there. Nor could they find a
bundle in a handkerchief, which they would have gnawn through speedily.
Not a scrap of food was there to be smelt at, so they left him. Roger
had indeed gone supperless, as usual; his supper he had swilled and not
eaten. His own fault; he should have exercised self-control. Well, I
don't know; let us consider further before we judge.
In houses the difficulty often is to get the servants up in the
morning; one cannot wake, and the rest sleep too sound--much the same
thing; yet they have clocks and alarums. The reapers are never behind.
Roger got off his planks, shook himself, went outside the shed, and
tightened his shoelaces in the bright light. His rough hair he just
pushed back from his forehead, and that was his toilet. His dry throat
sent him to the pump, but he did not swallow much of the water--he
washed his mouth out, and that was enough; and so without breakfast he
went to his work. Looking down from the stile on the high ground there
seemed to be a white cloud resting on the valley, through which the
tops of the high trees penetrated; the hedgerows beneath were
concealed, and their course could only be traced by the upper branches
of the elms. Under this cloud the wheat-fields were blotted out; there
seemed neither corn nor grass, work for man nor food for animal; there
could be nothing doing there surely. In the stillness of the August
morning, without song of bird, the sun, shining brilliantly high above
the mist, seemed to be the only living thing, to possess the whole and
reign above absolute peace. It is a curious sight to see the early
harvest morn--all hushed under the burning sun, a morn that you know is
full of life and meaning, yet quiet as if man's foot had never trodden
the land. Only the sun is there, rolling on his endless way.
Roger's head was bound with brass, but had it not been he would not
have observed anything in the aspect of the earth. Had a brazen band
been drawn firmly round his forehead it could not have felt more
stupefied. His eyes blinked in the sunlight; every now and then he
stopped to save himself from staggering; he was not in a condition to
think. It would have mattered not at all if his head had been clear;
earth, sky, and sun were nothing to him; he knew the footpath, and saw
that the day would be fine and hot, and that was sufficient for him,
because his eyes had never been opened.
The reaper had risen early to his labour, but the birds had preceded
him hours. Before the sun was up the swallows had left their beams in
the cowshed and twittered out into the air. The rooks and wood-pigeons
and doves had gone to the corn, the blackbird to the stream, the finch
to the hedgerow, the bees to the heath on the hills, the humble-bees to
the clover in the plain. Butterflies rose from the flowers by the
footpath, and fluttered before him to and fro and round and back again
to the place whence they had been driven. Goldfinches tasting the first
thistledown rose from the corner where the thistles grew thickly. A
hundred sparrows came rushing up into the hedge, suddenly filling the
boughs with brown fruit; they chirped and quarrelled in their talk, and
rushed away again back to the corn as he stepped nearer. The boughs
were stripped of their winged brown berries as quickly as they had
grown. Starlings ran before the cows feeding in the aftermath, so close
to their mouths as to seem in danger of being licked up by their broad
tongues. All creatures, from the tiniest insect upward, were in reality
busy under that curtain of white-heat haze. It looked so still, so
quiet, from afar; entering it and passing among the fields, all that
lived was found busy at its long day's work. Roger did not interest
himself in these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he
approached--they were making _papier-mache_ from the wood of the top
bar,--in the bright poppies brushing against his drab unpolished boots,
in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they were nothing to
him.
Why should they be? His life was work without skill or thought, the
work of the horse, of the crane that lifts stones and timber. His food
was rough, his drink rougher, his lodging dry planks. His books
were--none; his picture-gallery a coloured print at the alehouse--a
dog, dead, by a barrel, "Trust is dead! Bad Pay killed him." Of thought
he thought nothing; of hope his idea was a shilling a week more wages;
of any future for himself of comfort such as even a good cottage can
give--of any future whatever--he had no more conception than the horse
in the shafts of the waggon. A human animal simply in all this, yet if
you reckoned upon him as simply an animal--as has been done these
centuries--you would now be mistaken. But why should he note the colour
of the butterfly, the bright light of the sun, the hue of the wheat?
This loveliness gave him no cheese for breakfast; of beauty in itself,
for itself, he had no idea. How should he? To many of us the
harvest--the summer--is a time of joy in light and colour; to him it
was a time for adding yet another crust of hardness to the thick skin
of his hands.
Though the haze looked like a mist it was perfectly dry; the wheat was
as dry as noon; not a speck of dew, and pimpernels wide open for a
burning day. The reaping-machine began to rattle as he came up, and
work was ready for him. At breakfast-time his fellows lent him a
quarter of a loaf, some young onions, and a drink from their tea. He
ate little, and the tea slipped from his hot tongue like water from the
bars of a grate; his tongue was like the heated iron the housemaid
tries before using it on the linen. As the reaping-machine went about
the gradually decreasing square of corn, narrowing it by a broad band
each time, the wheat fell flat on the short stubble. Roger stooped,
and, gathering sufficient together, took a few straws, knotted them to
another handful as you might tie two pieces of string, and twisted the
band round the sheaf. He worked stooping to gather the wheat, bending
to tie it in sheaves; stooping, bending--stooping, bending,--and so
across the field. Upon his head and back the fiery sun poured down the
ceaseless and increasing heat of the August day. His face grew red, his
neck black; the drought of the dry ground rose up and entered his mouth
and nostrils, a warm air seemed to rise from the earth and fill his
chest. His body ached from the ferment of the vile beer, his back ached
with stooping, his forehead was bound tight with a brazen band. They
brought some beer at last; it was like the spring in the desert to him.
The vicious liquor--"a hair of the dog that bit him"--sank down his
throat grateful and refreshing to his disordered palate as if he had
drunk the very shadow of green boughs. Good ale would have seemed
nauseous to him at that moment, his taste and stomach destroyed by so
many gallons of this. He was "pulled together," and worked easier; the
slow hours went on, and it was luncheon. He could have borrowed more
food, but he was content instead with a screw of tobacco for his pipe
and his allowance of beer.
They sat in the corner of the field. There were no trees for shade;
they had been cut down as injurious to corn, but there were a few maple
bushes and thin ash sprays, which seemed better than the open. The
bushes cast no shade at all, the sun being so nearly overhead, but they
formed a kind of enclosure, an open-air home, for men seldom sit down
if they can help it on the bare and level plain; they go to the bushes,
to the corner, or even to some hollow. It is not really any advantage;
it is habit; or shall we not rather say that it is nature? Brought back
as it were in the open field to the primitive conditions of life, they
resumed the same instincts that controlled man in the ages past.
Ancient man sought the shelter of trees and banks, of caves and
hollows, and so the labourers under somewhat the same conditions came
to the corner where the bushes grew. There they left their coats and
slung up their luncheon-bundles to the branches; there the children
played and took charge of the infants; there the women had their hearth
and hung their kettle over a fire of sticks.