PART V: NELL Chapter 1

AUTUMN came, and gradually the farm-work slackened. The Bucksteep acres were cut, not much the worse for the storm—the hops were picked, and showed a fair crop of fuggles, though the goldings had not done so well. Harry sowed catch crops of trifolium and Italian rye grass, and started his autumn ploughings. Certain reactions had seized him after the harvest, and he had gone off wandering in the fields, away to villages where he had not strayed for months except to market. But the lapse had been short, for the adventure of Worge’s acres was not dead—his imagination had now its headquarters and sanctuary in the fields where he worked; he had no need to seek dreams and beauty far away, for they grew at his barndoor, and he strawed them in the furrows with his grain.

Tom’s dwindling zeal was reawakened by the account of the harvest which Harry scrawled to France—“Nine quarters we got from the Volunteer Field and five from the Sunk and six from Forges. Hops and roots did middling. All the potash fields were valiant. Maybe next year Father will buy a reaper-and-binder. The Reverend Mr. Sumption was proper at the harvest.” His brother wrote back a letter of which “Well done, young ’un” was the refrain. “Queer,” he wrote, “but [212] there’s a Forges Wood out here—they say the 5th Sussex named it and it was called something French before. It is not like Forges, for it is narrow like a dibble and the trees have no branches, being knocked off by crumps and nothing grows there becos of the gas. There are dead horses in it.”

Tom had seen plenty of fighting that autumn in Paschendaele, but was so far well and unhurt. He sent Thyrza home a bit of shell which had knocked off his tin hat and “shocked him all of a swum.” Everyone, he wrote, had laughed fit to bust at it—Thyrza thought that they laughed at queer things in the trenches. She fretted a little during those autumn days, for her hope was now almost a torment ... suppose Tom should never see the child their love had made. Every day in the paper there were long casualty lists, every day telegraph boys and girls went peddling to happy homes and blasted them with a slip of paper. They had knocked at doors in the country of the Four Roads—the eldest Pix had been killed early in October; then there had been the butcher’s son at Bodle Street, and the lawyer’s son at Hailsham, and poor Mus’ Piper’s boy had lost both legs.... The world looked suddenly very grey and treacherous to Thyrza; she dared not hope, lest hope should betray her, and her few moments of peaceful mother-happiness were riddled with doubts. Oh, if only God would let her have Tom back somehow, no matter how maimed, how helpless, how dependent on her.... Then she would suddenly react from her desire, shrink back in horror at the thought of Tom wounded, his strong sweet body all sick and disfigured.... “Better dead,” she would groan—and yet, a dead father for her child.... She found war a very tar’ble thing.

During the earlier years she had, in company with most people in the country of the Four Roads, passed lightly under its yoke. Even her widowhood had not brought it down upon her—Sam had so often left her, might so easily have come to grief in other ways. Except for those who were actually and poignantly bereaved, [213] the War made little difference to a large multitude for whom it existed only in France and in the newspapers. For a big section of England it did not begin till 1916, for it was not till then that it actually set foot on English soil. In 1916 the Conscription Act, the food scarcity, and War Agricultural Committees dumped it down on the doorsteps of Sussex folk who up till then had ignored it as a furrin business. Thyrza had not thought about it much—she had read the newspapers, and given little bits of help to war charities that appealed to her; but now that it had taken the man she loved, it had taken her too. She was tied with him to its chariot-wheels, one of the nameless victims of the great woe.

Her business, too, fretted her. She was not able for the exertions of the times, and was worried by the difficulties of getting supplies. To have no sweets for the little children who came in with their pennies, no tea for the old men and women who wanted it to warm and cheer their poor rheumatic bodies, no cheese and no bacon for the young men who worked in the fields ... all this grieved her gentle heart, and she brooded over it in a way she would not have done had she been in her usual health. She grew pale and nervous, found she had but little to say to lingering customers, sat huddled limply over her fire, rising slowly and heavily when the buzz of the little bell that used to be so gay forced her to exert herself and go to the door.

In this state, Mrs. Beatup took pity on her, and forgot the tacit warfare of the mother on the wife. If Thyrza was going to give a child to Tom, she was also going to give a grandchild to Tom’s mother. She often waddled down to the shop with good advice, or asked Thyrza up for an evening at Worge, and developed a new and unexpected optimism for her comfort.

[214]

“Reckon if Tom’s alive he’ll stick alive to the end—if he’d bin going to be killed he’d have bin killed afore now. Besides, he always wur the chap fur luck. I remember how when he wur a liddle feller he slid into the pond, and we all thought he’d be drownded, but Juglery pulled him out, and his faather hided him nigh out of his skin. So doan’t you vrother, my dear, but kip in good heart fur the saake of the liddle ’un wot’s coming. Tom ull live to see un, I can promise you. He sims unaccountable young to have a baby, but reckon he’d be younger still to die.”