Chapter 12

It was night before the dislocations of train and trap brought the Beatups back to Worge. A big yellow moon was swinging high, scattering a honey-coloured dust of light on the fields and copses and little lanes. The farms, hushed and shut, lay dark against their grain-fields drooping with harvest—in some fields the corn was already cut and shocked, each tasselled cone standing in the moonlight beside the black pool of its shadow.

The Beatups were silent—owing perhaps to their congestion in the trap. Nell was tired, and leaned against her mother. Life seemed a very sordid trip, in spite of the honey-coloured moon, which swung so high, the type of unfulfilled desire. Mrs. Beatup was thinking of Ivy and wondering if the soles of her boots were thick enough; and Zacky, wedged between them, planned a big hunt for conkers the next day. On the front seat, Mus’ Beatup sucked at his pipe and schemed a dash for the Rifle Volunteer before closing time. “If the War goes on much longer, there’ll be no more beer, so I mun git wot’s to be had. It’s those Russians, and be hemmed to them; reckon they’ll maake peace and never care if the War goes on a dunnamany year. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect of chaps wot went teetotal by Act of Parliament.”

Harry drove the old gelding, and as the trap lurched from farm to farm he marked those which had cut their grain, and which had not. They had reaped the Penny field at Cowlease, and the old bottoms of Slivericks stood [194] shocked beside the stream. Egypt Farm, with late hardy sowings, had not started—Worge started to-morrow.

That visit to Hastings had been a holiday before the solemn business of the year. For a long time he had planned his reaping—trudging the fields each day, fingering the awns, rubbing the straw. He must not cut too early or too late. Last year the oats had stood till they shed their seed, this year they must be caught in just the right moment of wind and sun.

On the whole the crops promised well. The old grounds of the Volunteer and the Street field had borne splendidly—the ploughed grass-lands not so well, except for Forges field, which, for some obscure reason, had brought forth a rich yield from its sour furrows. On the whole the wheat promised better than the oats, which in spite of the varieties he had chosen had thickened in the clays, and grown unwieldy with sedge leaves and tulip roots.

The problem of harvesting had worried him for a long time, for Mus’ Beatup absolutely refused to buy a steam reaper-and-binder; he wurn’t going to take no risks in war-time, and Harry must make what shift he could with the old horse machine, which had trundled slowly round the few acres of earlier Worge harvests, and must even trundle round the width of this new venture. In vain Harry pointed out the labour needed for binding—he must get help, that was all; the family would turn to, as it always did in harvest time. The absence of Ivy was a hard blow—for she practically did the work of a man—but he found an unexpected substitute in the curate, who with the other country clergy had been episcopally urged to lend a hand in harvest time. Mr. Poullett-Smith had watched young Beatup’s effort with an approval which condoned his wobblings between Church and chapel, and felt, moreover, that his help might send a balance down [195] on the Church side. He was a little scandalised to find soon after that Harry had also drawn in the Rev. Mr. Sumption—the curate’s offer put it into his head; besides, it was just the sort of thing one asked of Mr. Sumption—it seemed far more his job than preaching or praying.

The other helpers would just be the family, this time including Nell, for where her parson went she could go also, in spite of stained and welted hands. Elphick and Juglery could do about one man’s work between them, and there was a boy over school age on the loose in the village, who was hired for ten shillings and his meals.

Harry had written to Tom and told him of his maturing plans, but either his marriage had breached him from Worge, or the fact that the disciple had gone so much further than his master had made his anxious ardour cool away. His latest communication had been a field postcard, which, as he had forgotten to put a cross against any of its various items, presented a bewildering and conflicting mass of information, which Harry flipped into the coals with a wry smile.

However, he was able to stand alone, for he dared the chances of his new deeds. Oafish as he looked in his Sunday suit and gasper collar, the adventure of harvest was upon him as he jolted the old trap home under the moon. “Behold, the fields stand white to harvest” ... the words drifted like a cloud over his brain. These fields that he had prepared, that his plough had torn and his harrow broken, were fields of battle like the fields in France. On them he had fought, for the same reason as Tom fought the Germans, all the treacheries and assaults of nature, her raiding winds, her storming rains, her undermining rottenness in the soil, her blasting of thunder and choking of heat.

“Reckon to-morrow’s our Big Push,” he said to his father, rather proud of the metaphor, and was careful [196] that the old horse did not hurry stablewards too quickly, lest they should be home before the closing of the Rifle Volunteer, and lose a soldier thereby.