Chapter 3

Harry could not help laughing at the faces of Juglery and Elphick when he told them he meant to plough the Sunk Field.

“Br?ak up grass, Mus’ Harry!”

“Surelye! They’re asking farmers all over the country to grow more wheat.”

“Does Maaster know as you mean to plough the Sunk?”

“Reckon he does. I cud never do it wudout he let me.”

“Well,” said old Juglery, “I’ve bin on farm-work man and boy these dunnamany year, and I’ve only bruk up grass two times, and no good come of it, nuther. Wunst it wur fur oald Mus’ Backfield up at Odiam, him wot caum to nighe a hundred year, and then took a fit last fall and died of joy when he heard as wheat wur ninety shillings a quarter. T’other wur pore young Mus’ Pix of the Trulilows, and he bruk up a valiant pasture, and the oats caum up crawling about like pease, and each had a gurt squlgy root lik a pertater. I says to him, being young and joking like in those days, ‘You’re unaccountable lucky,’ says I, ‘to grow pease and pertaters on the same stalk,’ but he took it to heart, and went and shot himself in the oast. So you see as boath the yeomen I bruk up grass fur died, one o’ joy and t’other o’ sorrow.”

“Well, I shan’t die of nuther, and we’ll have the plough out Thursday if the weather hoalds.”

The men were getting used to being ordered about by Harry. Mus’ Beatup’s chill had gone off in a twisting bout of rheumatism, which returned every now and then with damp weather. He spent, therefore, a good deal of time in the house, with sometimes a hobble as far as the Rifle Volunteer, appearing only in the dry, frosty weather [123] when little could be done with harrow or plough. However, when neighbouring farmers began to remark on the enterprise of Worge, he was careful to take the credit to himself—indeed he almost fancied that it was his own doing, for Harry, who could have done nothing without his authority, was careful to consult him on every occasion, and it was Mus’ Beatup who ordered the grain and checked the accounts, with many groans and dismal foretellings.

Those were good days for Harry, behind his plough. Under the soft grey spring sky, rifted and stroked by wandering primrose lights, through the damp air that smelled of living mould, over the brown earth that rolled and sprayed like a wave from the driving coulter, he toiled sweating in the raw March cold. The smell of earth, the smell of his own sweat, the smell of the sweat of his horses hung thick over the plough, but every now and then soft damp puffs of air would blow into the miasma the fragrance of grass and primrose buds, of sticky, red, uncurling leaves, and the new moss in the woods. The share gleamed against the dun, and the brown twigs of the copses drew their spindled tracery against a sky which was the paler colour of earth—sometimes a shower would fall, slanting along the hedges, the thick drops tasting on Harry’s lips of the unfulfilled spring.

His work made him very tired. After all, he was barely seventeen, and though sturdy had only just begun to use his strength. The work of the farm was much increased by the new plan, yet it was impossible to bring extra hands to it, except occasionally by the conscription of Zacky. Harry milked and ploughed and scattered and dug, rising in the foggy blue darkness of the morning, and often sitting up late over calculations and accounts. Elphick and Juglery gave a pottering, rheumatic service, [124] Mus’ Beatup could only be irregularly relied upon. So in time Harry learned what it was to doze off out of sheer weariness over his supper, or fall across the bed asleep before he had pulled his trousers off. But strangely enough, he found the life no hardship. Before the first thrill of enterprise had passed he was beginning to like the work for its own sake. There was a new keen pleasure in the wearing of his muscles, almost a physical luxury in his fatigue, and the lying with spread limbs before the fire of evenings. His life seemed good and full—everything was worth while, eating or sleeping or toiling or resting. For the earth sometimes makes of her servants lovers.

He was far too busy during his working hours and weary during his leisure to find much temptation in his old errant pleasures. Willie Sinden appealed in vain to a grimy, sweaty Harry asleep for an hour before the fire at night—he was too unaccountable wearied to vrother about ratting or Willie’s new ferret; and he went to Senlac and Heathfield and Hailsham Fairs to sell beasts, not to drink ginger-beer or pot into the German Kaiser’s mouth in the shooting-gallery. Even the distant woods had ceased to call, for Harry was now tasting their adventure in his daily work. The chocolate furrows of the Sunk Field were part of that same wonder which had teased him in the fluttering hazels of Molash Spinney or the wind in the gorse-thickets of Thunders Hill. The far-off village green of Bird-in-Eye was not more full of spells than the new-sown acres by Forges Wood. By his toil, and because he toiled as a man, from the spark of imagination within him, and not as a beast from the grind of circumstances without, he had brought the distant adventure home.