Chapter 13

The next day broke out of a dandelion sky above Harebeating, but before the first pale colours had filtered into the white of the east, Harry was on his legs, pottering in the yard. All the little odds of farm-work must be done early, to leave him free for the day’s great doings. He anxiously snuffed the raw air—could its moisture, distilled in the globes that hung on thatch and ricks, be the warning of a day’s rain? The barometer stood high, but, like other Sussex farmers, he had learned to distrust his barometer, knowing the sudden tricks of turning winds, the local rains drunk out of the marshes, the chopping of the Channel tides. He disliked the flamy look of the sky, the glassiness of its reflection in the ponds ... he thought he felt a puff from the south-west. “O Lord,” he prayed, kneeling down behind the cowhouse door, “doan’t let it rain till we’ve got our harvest in. If faather loses money this fall, he’ll never let me breake up grass agaun. Please, Lord, kip it fine, wud a short east wind, and doan’t let anyone stay away or faather go to the Volunteer till we’ve adone. For Christ’s sake. Amen.”

Feeling soothed and reassured, he went in to breakfast.

The family was of mixed and uncertain mood. Mrs. Beatup was “vrothering” about what she could give the clergymen for dinner—“not as I care two oald straws about Mus’ Sumption, but Mus’ Smith he mun be guv summat gentlemanly to put inside.” Zacky was crossly scheming how best to carry through the conker [197] plan which Harry had rather threateningly forbidden. Nell was in a nervous flutter, her colour coming and going, her little hands curling and twitching under the table. Mus’ Beatup was given over to an orgie of pessimism, and before breakfast was finished had traced Worge’s progress from a blundered harvest to the auctioneer’s.

“There’s too many fields gitting ripe together,” he said drearily. “You shudn’t ought to have maade your sowings so close. Wot you want now is a week’s fine weather on end, and all your wark done on a wunst. You’ll never git it, surelye—the rain ull be on you before it’s over. Reckon the Sunk Field ull have seeded itself before you’re at it. You shud ought to have sown it later.”

“It’s fine time to think of all that now.”

“I’ve thought of it afore and agaun, but you’d never hearken. You think you’ve got more know than your faather wot wur a yeoman afore you wur born and never bruk up grass in his life.”

“There’s Mus’ Sumption,” cried Mrs. Beatup, looking out of the window. “He’s middling early—reckon he wants some breakfast.”

She reckoned right. Mrs. Hubble of the Horselunges had refused to get breakfast for her lodger at such an ungodly hour, and he had prowled round fasting to the Beatups, eyeing their bacon and fried bread through the window.

“The labourer is worthy of his hire,” he remarked as he sat down to the table, “and thou shalt not muzzle the ox which treadeth the corn....”

After breakfast they all went out to the Volunteer field, which was to be cut first. Harry took charge of the reaper, with Zacky a scowling protestant at the horse’s head, while the others turned to the sickling and binding. [198] Mr. Poullett-Smith had not arrived, having first to read Mattins and eat his breakfast, but he came about an hour after the start, a tall, bending, monkish figure, feeling just a little daring in his shirt-sleeves.

The meeting of the two parsons was friendliest on the Anglican side. Mr. Poullett-Smith was a good example of the Church of England’s vocation “to provide a resident gentleman for every parish”—besides, he pitied Sumption. The fellow was so obviously misfitted by his pastorate—a fanatical, ignorant Calvinism, blown about by eschatological winds, was his whole equipment; otherwise, thought the curate, he had neither dignity, knowledge nor education. He would have been far happier had he been left a blacksmith, had his half-crazy visions been allowed to burn themselves out like his forge fires, instead of being stoked by mistaken patronage and inadequate theological training. As things stood, he was absurd, even in no worthier setting than a forgotten village Bethel—a mere caricature of a minister, even in the pulpit of the Particular Baptists, an old-fashioned and fanatical sect with their heads full of doomsday. But here among the reapers he was splendid. His open shirt displayed a neck strong and supple and plump as a boy’s—the grey homespun was stuck with sweat to his shoulders, and the huge muscles of his back showed under it in long ovoid lumps. His years had taken nothing from his strength, merely added to his solidness and endurance. With his shock of brindled curls, his comely brown skin, his teeth white as barley-kernels, and eyes bright and deep as a hammer pond, and all the splendour of his body from shoulder to heel, he was as fine a specimen of a man as he was a poor specimen of a minister. Mr. Poullett-Smith paid him the honour due to his body, while seeing no honour due to his soul.

Mr. Sumption felt his physical superiority to the willowy, [199] tallow-faced curate; indeed he had a double advantage over him, for he felt a spiritual towering too. He despised his doctrines of Universal Redemption and Sacramental Grace just as much as he despised his lean white arms and delicate features. He gave his hand a grip that made him wince—he could feel the bones cracking under the pressure.... “He keeps his hands white that he may hold the Lord’s body,” he thought to himself.

The day was hot and misty. The blue sky glowed with a thick, soft heat, and a yellowish haze blurred hedges and barns. Even the roofs of Worge seemed far away, and the sounds of the neighbouring farms were dim—but distant sounds came more clearly, a siren crooned on the far-off sea, and the mutter of guns came like a tread over the motionless air. Harry heard it as he drove the reaper, mingling with the swish of sickles and the rub of bones.

For greater quickness, he had split the field into two unequal parts—the bigger one he was cutting with the reaper, the smaller was being cut by hand. Mr. Sumption, Mus’ Beatup and Elphick reaped, while Nell, the curate, Juglery and the boy from Prospect Cottages bound the sheaves. The old horse went so slowly that the sickles worked nearly as fast as the machine. After a time Harry gave up his place to his father, who had been unfitted by illness and intemperance for much strenuous work.

At first there was some talking and joking among the harvesters, but soon this wore to silence in the heat. Only from where Mr. Smith and Nell stooped together over the reaped corn, gathering it into sheaves, came murmurs of sound. Nell’s pale cheeks and lips were flushed with her toil and stooping, and her eyes were bright with a pleasure which toil cannot give. Her cotton dress, the colour of the sky, set out the brightness of her [200] hair, the colour of the corn. Her graceful, ineffectual hands, too, pleased the curate, for they were the only pair besides his in the field which were not coarse and burnt, with stubbed, black nails. Moreover, her pleasure and excitement at the day’s long promise made her more talkative than usual, and to a better purpose. He found that he liked her pleasant, blurry voice, which fled and fluttered over her words for fear that she should drawl them.

The sun climbed to the zenith, and the heat not only baked down from the sky, but scorched up out of the ground. The dust of the earth and of corn-stalks filled the air with a choking, chaffy thickness. The smell of dust came from the road, and from farmyards the smell of baking mud. The black oasts of Egypt across the way swam in a cloud of heat, and the red oasts of Worge were smeared to shadows in the steam of sunshine and dust. An aching of blue and yellow was in the harvesters’ eyes, and their bodies seemed to melt and drip. The reaper crawled even more slowly, with Mus’ Beatup sagging drowsily over the reins, and Zacky drooping against old Tassell, whose flanks ran with sweat, and from whose steaming hide came ammoniacal stable smells, whiffing over the harvesters every time he passed.

Mr. Poullett-Smith looked more than ever like a Sienese candle now that his forehead and cheeks were dabbled with sweat, like wax that had melted and run. He wiped his face periodically with a white handkerchief, which annoyed Mr. Sumption, though it was a fact that the curate had done excellent work, and made up in conscientious energy what he lacked in muscle and experience.

“Take off your waistcoat, or your sweat ull spoil the lining,” called the minister, and Mr. Smith rather unexpectedly followed his advice, having, as it happened, [201] quite lost sight of the pastor in that huge toiling figure, now almost bare of chest, with arms swinging like a flail. He saw only a labourer more experienced and a man more manly than himself, whose muscle he respected and whose commands he would obey.

From twelve o’clock onwards the problem for Harry had been to keep Mus’ Beatup away from the Rifle Volunteer. The field being near the Street, they could hear the pleasing jar of stopping wheels, the slam of the taproom door, even the creak of the Volunteer sign. As he swung out there over the Street, with his grey-green uniform and obsolete rifle, he seemed to say, “In my day yeomen never worked at noon, but came and drank good beer made of Sussex hops and talked of how we’d beat the French.... Now there is no good beer, and hardly any Sussex hops, and we talk of how we and the French together will beat the Germans. But come, good yeomen, all the same.”

Harry thought it advisable to detach Mus’ Beatup from the reaper, which trundled him up under the eaves of the Volunteer’s huge sprawling roof, so he suggested that old Juglery should take his place for a while, and that Mus’ Beatup should help with the binding. He also persuaded Mr. Sumption to give up his sickle and bind till closing-time. He felt that if his father worked between the two parsons he would not be so likely to scuffle an escape; for in spite of his rationalist enlightenment, Mus’ Beatup’s attitude in the presence of the clergy was very different from that which he took up in their absence—and his contempt of their doctrine was liable to be swallowed up in respect for their cloth.

Dinner was brought out soon after noon by Mrs. Beatup and the girl, a hard-breathing young person with a complexion like an over-ripe plum. There was beer, and there was tea, and bread and cheese—Mrs. Beatup’s [202] idea of summat gentlemanly to put inside the clergyman materialised in several crumbly sandwiches of tinned curried rabbit. They all sat down under the hedge furthest from the Volunteer, and were all rather silent, except Mr. Sumption, who had scarcely tired himself with the morning’s work and thought this a good opportunity to enter into an argument, or “hold a conference,” as he put it, with Mr. Poullett-Smith on the doctrine of Efficacious Grace. Mr. Smith, besides the reluctance of his Anglican breeding to discuss theology with an outsider, and his feeling as a public-school man that it was bad form to talk shop in mixed company, was far from theologically minded. Though he would not have owned it for worlds, he was already tired out. The continual stooping with the hot sun on his back had made him feel sick and dizzy, and Mrs. Beatup’s curried sandwiches had finished the work of the sun and roused definite symptoms of an indelicate nature. He lay against the hedge, looking languid and curiously human in his open shirt, his hair hanging a little over his forehead. Nell sat on her heels, and her eyes played over him tenderly, almost maternally.

“Reckon you’re tired,” she said in a low, drawling voice that no one else could hear.

They did not go back to work till nearly two, and the danger for Mus’ Beatup was over for the time. The afternoon was, as usual, more tiring than the morning, for the earth, if not the sun, was hotter, limbs were tired and stomachs were full. Harry mounted the curate on the reaper, though he was not much of a success, as he failed to realise the power of old Tassell’s habit, and did vigorous rein-work at the corners, with the result that the old horse was thrown completely off his bearings, and on one occasion nearly charged down the hedge, on another knocked over Zacky, and once came wearily to a standstill with all four feet in the uncut corn.

[203]

Mr. Poullett-Smith decided that he preferred binding to reaping, and was glad to find himself back beside Nell with her delicate ways—it was wonderful, he thought, how far she was above her surroundings; he had not noticed it before, for he had hardly ever seen her against the background of Worge, but in the frame of church or school, where her shining was not so bright. She was tired, he could see, but she did not grow moist and blowsy like the rest—her pretty hair draggled a bit, her mouth drooped rather sweetly, but exertion heightened her an?mic tints, and there was a glow about her when she talked, in spite of her fatigue.

Suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon, she broke away from him, and came back with a glass of water.

“Is that for me?” he exclaimed, as she held it out.

“Yes. I thought you must be getting thirsty.”

“I am—but aren’t you thirsty, too?”

“I had something to drink in the house—this is yours,” and she watched him drink with an eager sweetness and humility in her eyes.