Chapter 3

During the next few days the most remarkable sight at Worge was Harry’s industriousness. For nearly a week he rose at five, fed the pigs and helped with the milking, and during the whole day he was available for carting, digging, dunging, or anything else he had formerly fled from. He helped Elphick spray the young fuggles down by Forges and the Sunk Field, he took a cartload of roots over to Three Cups Corner, he groomed [72] the horses and plaited their manes, he compelled Zacky with threats of personal violence to spend Saturday afternoon scaring birds from the gooseberries, instead of, with six other little boys, carrying out an enveloping movement on Punnetts Town, with three-ha’pence to spend on sweets in the captured citadel. On the occasion of Mus’ Beatup’s next lapse, he stalled the cows and doctored the mare, and also, with much foresight, took off and hid his father’s boots, which prevented both his going to bed in them and his throwing them at his wife.

It would have been well if this virtuous state could have lasted till the hay harvest. This was early, for there was a spell of heat in May, and the fields were soon parched. The air was full of the smell of ripe hayseed, of the baking glumes of the oats, of the hot, sickly stew of elderflower and meadowsweet. Along the Four Roads eddies of dust flew from under the wheels and caked the grass and fennel-heads beside the way, and in the ruts of the little lanes the bennet and rest-barrow sprouted, with the thick-stalked sprawly pignut, and ragged robin. Unfortunately, all this scent and heat made Harry remember a wood over by Cade Street, where he had once lain and watched the moon rise rusty beyond Lobden’s House. It was unfortunate that he had such a memory, for it had more than once been his undoing. Somewhere under Harry’s skin, mixed with the sluggish currents of his country blood, was a strain of poetry and imagination. He cared nothing for books, nothing for beauty, nothing for music (except, perhaps, when they sang “Diadem” in the Bethel at dusk), and yet every now and then something would pull him from the earth he toiled on—a thing he was unaware of three weeks out of the four, seeing only the sods cleaving together—something would call him from meadow-hills that swept up their broomy cones to the sky, an adventure would [73] call from the Four Roads, a longing would call from the moon ... and off he would go to Stunts Green, to Starnash, Oxbottom’s Town, or Burnt Kitchen—just as, after a sober week, Mus’ Beatup would go off to the Rifle Volunteer.

His promise to Tom had made him resist the cruder temptations of ratting Sindens or bird’s-nesting Kadwells; but now it seemed to pull the other way. His brother was the only person he was in any degree afraid of, and he was safe at Waterheel, no longer his father’s vicar, waiting with barnyard discipline for the truant’s return.

So Harry went off to that wood at Cade Street, and spent the night there, in a hollow tree, watching the big yellow stars shuddering above the ash-boughs like candles in the wind, and sleeping with his head in a soft mush of last year’s leaves, that sent him back with his cheeks all smeary, and his hair caked with leaf-mast.

That was the day of the haycutting, when Mus’ Beatup and Juglery and Elphick sweated with bent backs in the field. Worge possessed a horse-rake, but the cutting had all to be done by hand, and the men’s backs ached and scorched in the sun, and their sweat dropped on their scythes. This labour, as was only natural, started in Mus’ Beatup a fearful thirst, and that night was “one of his bad nights”—one of the worst, in fact, for he threw the candlestick at his wife as well as his boots, and would not let her come to bed, so that she had to sleep with Ivy and Nell.

Harry felt rather ashamed, and tried hard to atone the next day by working himself sick. Mrs. Beatup and Ivy helped too, since haymaking was the one kind of field work which the women did not feel it derogatory to perform. Ivy was a whacking girl, nearly as good as a [74] man; but Mus’ Beatup would never have dreamed of asking her to help fill Tom’s empty place. If town girls thought so little of themselves as to enrol for farm work, that was no concern of his, but he was hemmed if he’d have his wife and daughter meddling with anything beyond the fowl-house, and as for employing other women whose dignity mattered less to him—and, apparently, to themselves—he’d sooner Worge went to the auctioneer’s, just to teach the government a lesson.