In August the unclouded sun, when there is no wind, shines as fervently
in the harvest-field as in Spain. It is doubtful if the Spanish people
feel the heat so much as our reapers; they have their siesta; their
habits have become attuned to the sun, and it is no special strain upon
them. In India our troops are carefully looked after in the hot
weather, and everything made as easy for them as possible; without care
and special clothing and coverings for the head they could not long
endure. The English simoon of heat drops suddenly on the heads of the
harvesters and finds them entirely unprepared; they have not so much as
a cooling drink ready; they face it, as it were, unarmed. The sun
spares not; It is fire from morn till night. Afar in the town the
sun-blinds are up, there is a tent on the lawn in the shade, people
drink claret-cup and use ice; ice has never been seen in the
harvest-field. Indoors they say they are melting lying on a sofa in a
darkened room, made dusky to keep out the heat. The fire falls straight
from the sky on the heads of the harvesters--men, women, and
children--and the white-hot light beats up again from the dry straw and
the hard ground.
The tender flowers endure; the wide petal of the poppy, which withers
between the fingers, lies afloat on the air as the lilies on water,
afloat and open to the weight of the heat. The red pimpernel looks
straight up at the sky from the early morning till its hour of closing
in the afternoon. Pale blue speedwell does not fade; the pale blue
stands the warmth equally with the scarlet. Far in the thick wheat the
streaked convolvulus winds up the stalks, and is not smothered for want
of air though wrapped and circled with corn. Beautiful though they are,
they are bloodless, not sensitive; we have given to them our feelings,
they do not share our pain or pleasure. Heat has gone into the hollow
stalks of the wheat and down the yellow tubes to the roots, drying them
in the earth. Heat has dried the leaves upon the hedge, and they touch
rough--dusty rough, as books touch that have been lying unused; the
plants on the bank are drying up and turning white. Heat has gone down
into the cracks of the ground; the bar of the stile is so dry and
powdery in the crevices that if a reaper chanced to drop a match on it
there would seem risk of fire. The still atmosphere is laden with heat,
and does not move in the corner of the field between the bushes.
Roger the reaper smoked out his tobacco; the children played round and
watched for scraps of food; the women complained of the heat; the men
said nothing. It is seldom that a labourer grumbles much at the
weather, except as interfering with his work. Let the heat increase, so
it would only keep fine. The fire in the sky meant money. Work went on
again; Roger had now to go to another field to pitch--that is, help to
load the waggon; as a young man, that was one of the jobs allotted to
him. This was the reverse. Instead of stooping he had now to strain
himself upright and lift sheaves over his head. His stomach empty of
everything but small ale did not like this any more than his back had
liked the other; but those who work for bare food must not question
their employment. Heavily the day drove on; there was more beer, and
again more beer, because it was desired to clear some fields that
evening. Monotonously pitching the sheaves, Roger laboured by the
waggon till the last had been loaded--till the moon was shining. His
brazen forehead was unbound now; in spite of the beer the work and the
perspiration had driven off the aching. He was weary but well. Nor had
he been dull during the day; he had talked and joked--cumbrously in
labourers' fashion--with his fellows. His aches, his empty stomach, his
labour, and the heat had not overcome the vitality of his spirits.
There was life enough left for a little rough play as the group
gathered together and passed out through the gateway. Life enough left
in him to go with the rest to the alehouse; and what else, oh moralist,
would you have done in his place? This, remember, is not a fancy sketch
of rural poetry; this is the reaper's real existence.
He had been in the harvest-field fourteen hours, exposed to the intense
heat, not even shielded by a pith helmet; he had worked the day through
with thew and sinew; he had had for food a little dry bread and a few
onions, for drink a little weak tea and a great deal of small beer. The
moon was now shining in the sky, still bright with sunset colours.
Fourteen hours of sun and labour and hard fare! Now tell him what to
do. To go straight to his plank-bed in the cowhouse; to eat a little
more dry bread, borrow some cheese or greasy bacon, munch it alone, and
sit musing till sleep came--he who had nothing to muse about. I think
it would need a very clever man indeed to invent something for him to
do, some way for him to spend his evening. Read! To recommend a man to
read after fourteen hours' burning sun is indeed a mockery; darn his
stockings would be better. There really is nothing whatsoever that the
cleverest and most benevolent person could suggest. Before any
benevolent or well-meaning suggestions could be effective the preceding
circumstances must be changed--the hours and conditions of labour,
everything; and can that be done? The world has been working these
thousands of years, and still it is the same; with our engines, our
electric light, our printing press, still the coarse labour of the
mine, the quarry, the field has to be carried out by human hands. While
that is so, it is useless to recommend the weary reaper to read. For a
man is not a horse: the horse's day's work is over; taken to his stable
he is content, his mind goes no deeper than the bottom of his manger,
and so long as his nose does not feel the wood, so long as it is met by
corn and hay, he will endure happily. But Roger the reaper is not a
horse.
Just as his body needed food and drink, so did his mind require
recreation, and that chiefly consists of conversation. The drinking and
the smoking are in truth but the attributes of the labourer's
public-house evening. It is conversation that draws him thither, just
as it draws men with money in their pockets to the club and the houses
of their friends. Any one can drink or smoke alone; it needs several
for conversation, for company. You pass a public-house--the reaper's
house--in the summer evening. You see a number of men grouped about
trestle-tables out of doors, and others sitting at the open window;
there is an odour of tobacco, a chink of glasses and mugs. You can
smell the tobacco and see the ale; you cannot see the indefinite power
which holds men there--the magnetism of company and conversation.
_Their_ conversation, not _your_ conversation; not the last book, the
last play; not saloon conversation; but theirs--talk in which neither
you nor any one of your condition could really join. To us there would
seem nothing at all in that conversation, vapid and subjectless; to
them it means much. We have not been through the same circumstances:
our day has been differently spent, and the same words have therefore a
varying value. Certain it is, that it is conversation that takes men to
the public-house. Had Roger been a horse he would have hastened to
borrow some food, and, having eaten that, would have cast himself at
once upon his rude bed. Not being an animal, though his life and work
were animal, he went with his friends to talk. Let none unjustly
condemn him as a blackguard for that--no, not even though they had seen
him at ten o'clock unsteadily walking to his shed, and guiding himself
occasionally with his hands to save himself from stumbling. He
blundered against the door, and the noise set the swallows on the beams
twittering. He reached his bedstead, and sat down and tried to unlace
his boots, but could not. He threw himself upon the sacks and fell
asleep. Such was one twenty-four hours of harvest-time.
The next and the next, for weeks, were almost exactly similar; now a
little less beer, now a little more; now tying up, now pitching, now
cutting a small field or corner with a fagging-hook. Once now and then
there was a great supper at the farm. Once he fell out with another
fellow, and they had a fight; Roger, however, had had so much ale, and
his opponent so much whisky, that their blows were soft and helpless.
They both fell--that is, they stumbled,--they were picked up, there was
some more beer, and it was settled. One afternoon Roger became suddenly
giddy, and was so ill that he did no more work that day, and very
little on the following. It was something like a sunstroke, but
fortunately a slight attack; on the third day he resumed his place.
Continued labour in the sun, little food and much drink, stomach
derangement, in short, accounted for his illness. Though he resumed his
place and worked on, he was not so well afterwards; the work was more
of an effort to him, and his face lost its fulness, and became drawn
and pointed. Still he laboured, and would not miss an hour, for harvest
was coming to an end, and the extra wages would soon cease. For the
first week or so of haymaking or reaping the men usually get drunk,
delighted with the prospect before them, they then settle down fairly
well. Towards the end they struggle hard to recover lost time and the
money spent in ale.
As the last week approached, Roger went up into the village and ordered
the shoemaker to make him a good pair of boots. He paid partly for them
then, and the rest next pay-day. This was a tremendous effort. The
labourer usually pays a shilling at a time, but Roger mistrusted
himself. Harvest was practically over, and after all the labour and the
long hours, the exposure to the sun and the rude lodging, he found he
should scarcely have thirty shillings. With the utmost ordinary care he
could have saved a good lump of money. He was a single man, and his
actual keep cost but little. Many married labourers, who had been
forced by hard necessity to economy, contrived to put by enough to buy
clothes for their families. The single man, with every advantage,
hardly had thirty shillings, and even then it showed extraordinary
prudence on his part to go and purchase a pair of boots for the winter.
Very few in his place would have been as thoughtful as that; they would
have got boots somehow in the end, but not beforehand. This life of
animal labour does not grow the spirit of economy. Not only in farming,
but in navvy work, in the rougher work of factories and mines, the same
fact is evident. The man who labours with thew and sinew at horse
labour--crane labour--not for himself, but for others, is not the man
who saves. If he worked for his own hand possibly he might, no matter
how rough his labour and fare; not while working for another. Roger
reached his distant home among the meadows at last, with one golden
half-sovereign in his pocket. That and his new pair of boots, not yet
finished, represented the golden harvest to him. He lodged with his
parents when at home; he was so far fortunate that he had a bed to go
to; therefore in the estimation of his class he was not badly off. But
if we consider his position as regards his own life we must recognise
that he was very badly off indeed, so much precious time and the
strength of his youth having been wasted.
Often it is stated that the harvest wages recoup the labourer for the
low weekly receipts of the year, and if the money be put down in
figures with pen and ink it is so. But in actual fact the pen-and-ink
figures do not represent the true case; these extra figures have been
paid for, and gold may be bought too dear. Roger had paid heavily for
his half-sovereign and his boots; his pinched face did not look as if
he had benefited greatly. His cautious old father, rendered frugal by
forty years of labour, had done fairly well; the young man not at all.
The old man, having a cottage, in a measure worked for his own hand.
The young man, with none but himself to think of, scattered his money
to the winds. Is money earned with such expenditure of force worth the
having? Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the
harvest-field--thin, muscular, sinewy, black almost, it tells of
continual strain. After much of this she becomes pulled out of shape,
the neck loses its roundness and shows the sinews, the chest flattens.
In time the women find the strain of it tell severely. I am not trying
to make out a case of special hardship, being aware that both men,
women, and children work as hard and perhaps suffer more in cities; I
am simply describing the realities of rural life behind the scenes. The
golden harvest is the first scene: the golden wheat, glorious under the
summer sun. Bright poppies flower in its depths, and convolvulus climbs
the stalks. Butterflies float slowly over the yellow surface as they
might over a lake of colour. To linger by it, to visit it day by day,
at even to watch the sunset by it, and see it pale under the changing
light, is a delight to the thoughtful mind. There is so much in the
wheat, there are books of meditation in it, it is dear to the heart.
Behind these beautiful aspects comes the reality of human labour--hours
upon hours of heat and strain; there comes the reality of a rude life,
and in the end little enough of gain. The wheat is beautiful, but human
life is labour.