Chapter VII: Part IV: IVY (2)

Ivy was not a sensitive soul, but the Beatup attitude was warranted to pierce the thickest skin. The family could not let the matter drop, and kept it up even after those outside had let it fall in to amiable “disremembering.” Ivy’s exuberant correspondence with the forces, her amorous past, her scandalous future, all became subjects of condemnation. Her people did not mean to be unkind, but they nagged and scolded. Perhaps the balking of their revenge on Jerry Sumption made them specially unmerciful towards Ivy—she had to face the torrent of the diverted stream. She had disgraced them as, apparently, none of Mus’ Beatup’s muddled carouses or gin-logged collapses had done. The fine, if beer-blown flower of the Beatups had been hopelessly picked to pieces by her wantonness and indiscretion. Nell was perhaps the most really vindictive of the lot (for Mus’ Beatup was easy-going and Mrs. Beatup loved her daughter through all her reproaches), because she saw in Ivy’s disgrace another danger to her hopes. She had enough odds against her in her poor little reedy romance without all the spilth of Ivy’s bursting thick amours to come tumbling over it, choking out its life. Ivy’s village friends turned against her too, for Polly Sinden was still trying to live up to Bill Putland, and Jen Hollowbone of the Foul Mile remembered the theft of Kadwell and taunted “Sarve her right.” Thyrza, her sister-in-law, was still friendly, but though Ivy liked Thyrza, there had never been any real confidence or comradeship between them—the elder girl was too quiet, too settled, and had always been lacking in that indefinite quality which makes a woman popular with her own sex. Ivy did not respond to Thyrza’s few tentative efforts, made, she suspected, out of pity, and a sense of duty to Tom. Besides, her trouble had soured for the time even her own sweet honest heart, and the sight of Thyrza secure of a man’s love and an even more wonderful hope, smote her with an unbearable sense of her own failure and loneliness.

For the worst of all that Ivy had to bear was her love for Seagrim, still alive, though wounded and outraged. Her old gay interest in young men, her comradeships and correspondences, had faded out and could occupy her no more. Her heart was full of a mixed dread and hope of meeting him again. Sometimes when the purple chaffy evenings drew down over the fields, and the smell of ripening grain and ripening hops made sweet sick perfume on the drowsy air, an ache which was almost madness would drive her out into the lanes, seeking him by the tall stile at Four Wents, where he would never come again. The fiery horn of the moon, the jigging candles of the stars, would glow out of the grape-coloured sky as she went home through a fog of tears, slipping and stumbling in the ruts, dreaming of his step beside her and his arm about her and his bulk all black in the dimness of the lane.... Then suddenly she would hate him for all he had made her suffer, for all the lies he had told her and all the truths, for the kisses he had given her and the tears that he had cost her—and the hate would hurt more than love, choke her and burn her, make her throw herself sobbing and gasping into bed, where the hunch of Nell’s cold shoulder and the polar stars that hung in the window joined in preaching the same lesson of loneliness.

Then one day she made up her mind quite suddenly to bear it no longer. “If you have much more of this you’ll go crazy,” she said to herself, “—so git shut of it, Ivy Beatup.”

9

Ivy’s disappearance was not found out till late in the evening. In spite of the dejection and heartache of the last week, her failure to appear at supper with a healthy appetite was an alarming sign. It was now remembered that no one seemed to have seen her all the evening. Mrs. Beatup burst into tears.

“She’s chucked herself into the pond, for sartain-sure. You’ve bin so rough wud her, Maaster—you’ve bruk her heart, surelye.”

“I rough wud a girl as has disgraced us all! I’ve took no notice of her a dunnamany days.”

“That’s why, I reckon. You’ve bruk her heart. Git along, Harry, and drag the pond, and doan’t sit staring at me lik a fowl wud gapes.”

“Maybe she’s only gone into Senlac to see the pictures.”

“And maybe she’s only run away wud that lousy furrin soldier of hern.”

“I tell you she’s drownded. I feel it in my boans. She’s floating on the water lik a dead cat. Go out and see, Harry! Go out and see!”

Zacky began to howl.

“Adone, do, mother!” cried Harry. “You’re the one fur the miserables. Reckon Ivy’s only out enjoying herself.”

“I’d go myself,” sobbed Mrs. Beatup, “but my oald legs feel that swummy. Oh, I can see her floating, all swelled up!”

During this scene Nell had slipped out of the room. She was now back in the doorway, saying icily—

“You needn’t worry. Ivy’s taken all her clothes with her.”

The family took a little time to get the drift of her words.

“All her clothes!” murmured Mrs. Beatup faintly.

“Yes—in the pilgrim-basket, so you may be sure she hasn’t drowned herself.”

“She’s gone away wud that dirty soldier!” cried Mus’ Beatup. “That justabout proves it.”

“It doan’t,” said his wife. “Ivy’s an honest girl.”

“An honest girl as walks out wud a married man fur all the Street to see, and then goes and gits half murdered by a gipsy!”

“A clergyman’s son,” corrected Mrs. Beatup. “And it wurn’t her fault, nuther. Our Ivy may be a bit flighty, but she’s pure as the morning’s milk.”

“Whur’s she gone, then? She’d nowheres to go. You doan’t know the warld as I do, and I tell you she’s gone wud un, and be hemmed to her. We’re all disgraced and ull never hoald up our heads agaun.”

“I woan’t believe it.”

“You’re an obstinate oald wife—I tell you it’ll be proved to-morrer.”

“How?”

“I’ll go to the camp myself and find out. If Seagrim’s gone too, then it’s proved.”

The family went to bed convinced, except for Mrs. Beatup—who kept up a mulish belief in her daughter’s honesty—that Ivy had run away with Seagrim.

The next morning Mus’ Beatup set out for Hailsham to make enquiries. But he had not been fitted by nature for a diplomatic visit to a military camp—all he did was to fall foul of various sentries and nearly get arrested. In the end he found himself back in the road, with nothing gained except perhaps the fact that he was not in the guard-room. He felt as if the whole British Army were in league against him, the accomplice of one Corporal in his crimes, and was scanning the scenery for a public-house when he heard the sound of marching feet, and a file came tramping up the road, commanded by Seagrim himself.

Mus’ Beatup straddled across his way.

“Who are you? Stand clear!” cried the Corporal, while the file marched stiffly onwards.

“Whur’s my daughter?”

“Stand clear—or A’ll have you put under arrest.”

“I want my daughter—Ivy Beatup.”

“Halt!” cried Seagrim to the file, which had now marched a discreet distance ahead. “A don’t knaw owt of your daughter. A’ve not clapped eyes on her sine Sunday week.”

“She’s run away.”

“A don’t knaw owt.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“A don’t knaw owt. Quick march!” and off went he and his file in a cloud of dust, leaving Mus’ Beatup furious and confounded.

“He’s a militaryist,” he mumbled, “a hemmed militaryist—treating me as if I wur pigs’ dirt. That’s wot we’re coming to, I reckon, wot Govunmunt’s brung us to—militaryists and the pigs’ dirt they spannell on. Ho! there’ll be a revolution soon”—and he floundered up the road towards Hailsham where the sign of the Red Lion hung across the way.

10

Jerry Sumption knew nothing of Ivy’s disappearance, for the morning after that fatal Sunday his father had taken him off to Brighton, and from Brighton he had gone back to France. In fact his whole notion of the affair was hazy—inflamed by one or two unaccustomed glasses of bad whisky and the memory of Ivy on Seagrim’s arm, he had rushed and stumbled through what seemed to him now a wild nightmare of phantasmagoria from which he had waked into aching and disgrace.

He was sullen company during those few days at Brighton. Mr. Sumption had chosen Brighton because it was at a safe, and also not too expensive, distance from Sunday Street. Moreover, he hoped it would provide some distraction for Jerry. The financial problem had been great, but he had solved it by drawing out the whole of his savings. He took a poor little lodging at the back of the town, from which he and Jerry travelled down daily by ’bus and tram to the diversions of the sea-front.

It was not a quite successful holiday, which was indeed hardly to be expected. Mr. Sumption brought preachment to bear on Jerry’s sullenness—he did not understand what a hazy impression the catastrophe had made, and that to him, though not to Ivy, the scene by Twelve Pound spinney mattered less than that earlier scene in Forges Field. Also Mr. Sumption’s ideas of amusement were not the same as his son’s. He decided to risk the Lord’s displeasure and visit a Picture Palace for Jerry’s sake, but was so scandalised by what he saw that he insisted on leaving after half an hour’s distress.

“Surely it is the house of Satan with those red lights,” he exclaimed with sundry cracks and tosses.

“What’s the matter with red lights? You get ’em in a forge.”

“But a forge is the place of honest toil—and a kinema’s but a place of gaping and idleness and worse: three hundred folks got together to see lovers kissing, which is a private matter.”

Jerry laughed bitterly.

“Three hundred folk gaping at an ungodly picture, who might be saving their souls. I tell you, boy, there ull come a red day, that ull burn redder than any forge or picture-house, and all the ungodly gazers shall be pitched into it like weeds into the oven, and only the saints escape—with the singeing of their garments.”

“Oh, Father, do speak cheerful. I’m that down-hearted.”

“Reckon you are, my poor lad—and the Lord rebuke me if I add to your burden. This looks a godly sort of a pastry-cook’s. Let’s go in and get some tea.”

The next day was the last of Jerry’s leave, and the one that he and his father spent most happily together. Mr. Sumption’s ideas of entertainment seemed quite hopeless to Jerry, but during those last hours he felt drawn closer to the being who he knew was the only friend he had. They spent the morning on the pier, listening to the band, and in the afternoon went by the motor-bus to Rottingdean—a trip so surprisingly expensive that there was no money left to pay for their tea, and while the other excursionists sat down to long tables, they had to wander upon the down, whence they watched the feasters, Jerry like a forlorn sparrow and Mr. Sumption like a hungry crow, till it was time to go home.

But all the while the minister could see his son growing more dependent on him, and in his heart he thanked the Lord. His delight at having won that much poor show of affection blinded him a little to the pathos of the outlaw clinging to his only prop, before he was flung to troubles and dangers which he realised in helpless foreboding. The chapel weed clung to the chapel stone before it was rudely torn up and thrown out to the burning.

Their final parting was abusive, owing to Mr. Sumption’s having left Jerry’s dinner of sandwiches behind at their rooms, but the father would always have a thankful memory of that evening when Jerry had been simple and grateful and rather childish, and had listened to his good advice, and had not interrupted with his cry for cheerfulness the stream of Calvinistic warning.

They had sat by the big ugly window of their room, looking out at the first dim stars pricking the sky above Kemp Town. Jerry’s eyes were full of a mysterious trouble as they pondered the new serenity of his father’s face.

“Father,” he said suddenly, “you’ll watch and pray that Satan don’t get me.”

“Satan can’t hurt the elect.”

“But maybe I’m not one of the elect. Didn’t seem like it on Sunday, did it?”

“That was the Lord’s trial sent to us both—He delivered you unto Satan for a while that you might find His ways.”

“Reckon His ways are not for my finding.”

“I will pray for you, my dear.”

“Father, you promise, you swear, as you’ll never let me go? I sometimes feel as if there was only you standing betwixt me and hell. Reckon you’re the only soul in all the world that cares about me.”

11

By the time Mus’ Beatup had groped his stumbling way from Hailsham to Sunday Street, the anxieties of Worge about Ivy were at an end. A letter had come during the morning and was flapped in his face. He was not sober enough to read it, nor yet too drunk to have it read to him.

“8 Bozzum Square,
“Hastings.

“Dear Mother,—I hope this finds you well as it leaves me at
present. I got fed up as the boys say and came here. Do you
remember Ellen Apps and her folk lived at the Fowl Mile up the
Hollowbones. She is here working on the trams, I heard from Jen,
so thought I go and ask her. She says I will get a job in a day
or 2 with my strong physic, so do not worry about me, I am with
Ellen and hope to start work next week. Having no more to say, I
will now draw to a close. Fondest love from

“Your loving daughter, IVY.”

“I toald you as she’d never gone wud Seagrim!” cried Mrs. Beatup.

“Umph,” grunted her husband—“but she’s gone on the trams, which is next bad to it. Now if she’d gone maaking munititions....”

“Trams is better than munititions.”

“No it aun’t. Fine ladies and duchesses maake munititions, but I never saw a duchess driving a tram.”

“Ivy ull never drive a tram—she’d be killed, surelye.”

“Best thing she cud do for herself now she’s disgraced us all—a darter of mine on the trams, a good yeoman’s darter on the trams ... ’tis shameful.”

“But ’tis honest, Maaster—better nor if she’d run away wud a man.”

“Maybe—but ’tis shameful honest. I’m shut of her!”

“Oh, Ned!—our girl!”

“Your girl!”

“You cruel, unnatural faather!”

“Adone do, and taake off my boots.”

The matter ended temporarily in sniffs and grunts, but when Mus’ Beatup woke out of the sleep which followed the removal of his boots, he reviewed it more auspiciously. After all, working on the trams was better than working in the fields—suppose Ivy had gone and offered her robust services to some neighbouring farmer, to some twopenny smallholder perhaps, then the yeoman name of Beatup would have indeed been trampled into the earth. Now trams were town work, trams were war work, trams were engineering. In time “my darter on the trams” began to sound nearly as well as “my son at the front.”

So a letter was written in which Ivy’s choice was deplored, though not condemned. She was invited to come home, or if obstinate on that point, to turn her attention to the more aristocratic “munititions,” but if it must be trams, then trams it should be unreproached.

Ivy wrote back in a few days, saying that she had “joined up” and enclosing a photograph of herself in uniform. She would soon be earning thirty shillings a week, and had taken a room of her own in Bozzum Square. Her family had now quite forgiven her, especially as they found the neighbourhood inclined to applaud rather than to despise Beatup’s daughter on the trams. Her mother would have liked her home, but Ivy was quite firm about sticking to her job. “I’m best away from the Street as things are, and I’ll send you five shillings a week home, and you can get a girl with that and what you save from my keep.” But it would have taken two girls to make a real substitute for Ivy.

Mrs. Beatup, besides the gap in her motherly feelings, missed her terribly about the house. Her sturdy willingness to scrub or clean, her cheery indifference to the little indelicacies of emptying slops or gutting chickens, her unfailing good-humour and bubbling vitality, the rough, tender comfort she gave in hours of sorrow, all made Ivy of a special, irreplaceable value in her mother’s working-day. Nell refused to give up her “teachering,” and spoke obstinately of indentures, and other irrelevant puzzles. Anyhow her squeamishness—she even washed the dishes with a wrinkled nose—and the delicacy of her small soft hands would make her pretty useless in hen-house or kitchen. Mrs. Beatup began to talk of Ivy as much as she thought of her, and soon her family came to find her more of a nuisance now she was away than she had been at home in her most disruptive moments.

However, her forgiveness was complete, and the reconciliation was celebrated by a solemn ride in “Ivy’s tram” by all the Beatups. It was during the summer holidays, so Nell was able to go—Mrs. Beatup wore her Dionysian bonnet, and her husband his best Sunday blacks, Harry and Zacky were scrubbed and collared into oafishness, the house was shut up and left in charge of Elphick and Juglery, as it had never been since Tom’s wedding.

“Ivy’s tram” was on the line from the Albert Memorial to Ore, and ground its way through dreadful suburbs up Mount Pleasant, past the decayed “residences” of Hastings’ prime, slabbed with stucco and bulging with bow-windows, now all grimed and peeled and darkened, chopped into lodgings and sliced into flats, not the ghost of prosperity but its rotting corpse.

The tram ground and screamed and swished on the rails, and Ivy, rosy-faced under her tramwayman’s cap—with its peak over the curl that hid her ear—came forcing her way up the inside for fares, taking from each Beatup its separate penny. She looked exuberantly well, and quite happy again; she also smelled strongly of tram-oil, and Nell’s little nose wrinkled even more than when she had smelt of soapsuds and milk. She had a cheery word for each one of her family, who in their turn sat abashed, holding their tickets stiffly between finger and thumb, their eyes slewed on Ivy as she took other passengers’ fares, answered their questions, trundled them out, bundled them in, pulled the bell, ran up to the roof, changed the sign, and flung a little good-humoured chaff at Bill the motorman when they reached the terminus.

She had no time off till late that evening, so when the family had ridden in state to Ore, they rode back again to the Memorial. The parting was a little spoiled by the crowd which was waiting to board the tram and reduced Mrs. Beatup’s farewell embrace into something grabbing and unseemly.

“Good-by, mother dear, and doan’t you vrother. I’m valiant here.... Full inside, ma’am, and no standing allowed on the platform.... Now, Nell, take care of mother and hold her arm—she’s gitting scattery—and adone, do, mother, for there’s too many fares on the top, and I’m hemmed if I haven’t bitten a grape out of your bonnet.”

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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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 anæmic 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.

14

For the next two or three days the work went well. The Volunteer Field was reaped, and then the Street Field; the Sunk and Forges must be tackled before the fine weather came to an end, but the low grounds by Bucksteep might be left to stand a little, being sheltered, and not quite ready for harvest. Harry’s mixed gang of helpers was a bigger success than he had dared hope. Mr. Sumption was even better the second day than the first, having worked down a stiffness which his big muscles had acquired from long disuse. Even Mrs. Beatup was impressed, and gave him a fine breakfast every morning. The other clergyman was not so useful, but he made up in effort what he lacked in achievement, and by Friday was doing quite a creditable day’s work. Nell was not, of course, much good, still, she was better than nothing, and more energetic and good-humoured than Harry had ever seen her. Zacky and the hired boy conspired in laziness and evil-doing, and Harry was grateful when the Rev. Mr. Sumption took it upon himself to knock their heads together.

On Friday evening grey smears of cloud lay on a strange whiteness in the west, and on Saturday the whole sky was smudged over with a pale opacity, and the wind blew from the South. The labourers found relief from the stewing, chaffy stillness of the last few days; but Harry snuffed the air and looked wise.

“The weather’s breaking up,” he said to his father in the dinner-hour. “We’ll have to work on Sunday.”

“Wud two passons!” cried Mus’ Beatup. “They’ll never coame. They’ll be preaching tales about dead men.”

“Reckon we must do wudout them. We durn’t leave the Sunk Field till after the weather. Bucksteep can wait, surelye, but the Sunk must be reaped before the rain.”

Mus’ Beatup groaned—“That’s the wust of doing aught wud passons. ’Tis naun to them if it rains on Monday—all they care is that a dunnamany hunderd years agone it rained forty days and forty nights and drownded all the world saave Noah and his beasts. Bah!” and Mus’ Beatup spat into the hedge.

However, to their surprise, they found both the parsons ready to work on Sunday. Mr. Poullett-Smith had no less authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury—the Archbishop quoted Christ’s saying of the ox in the pit, and gave like indulgence to all Churchmen. The Rev. Mr. Sumption appeared with no such sanctions.

“I’ve got no Randall Cantuar or Charles John Chichester to tell me I may break the Lord’s commandments. Reckon the Assembly ull be against me in this, and the Lord Himself ull be against me; but I’ll risk it. For you’re a good lad, Harry Beatup, and I’m going to stand by you, and if the Lord visits it on me I must bow to His will.”

When service-time came he had the advantage, for he polished off his bewildered congregation in only a little over half an hour, whereas the curate was nearly two hours at Brownbread Street, with a sung Eucharist. “I can say what I like and pray what I like,” said Mr. Sumption. “I’m not tied down to a Roman Mass-book dressed-up Protestant.”

Mr. Smith heard him in silence. His respect for him as a man and a labourer still outweighed his contempt for him as preacher and theologian. Also he now felt that in matters of religion Mr. Sumption was slightly crazed. He could handle a horse or a hammer or a sickle with sureness and skill, and talk of them with sanity and knowledge, but once let him mount his religious notions and he would ride to the devil. Mr. Smith came to the conclusion that he was one of those crack-brained people who believed that the war was the end of the world, the Consummation of the Age foretold in Scripture, and that soon Christ would come again in the clouds with great glory.—This really was what Mr. Sumption believed, so Mr. Smith did not misjudge him much.

By noon on Sunday dark clouds were swagging up from the south-west, with a screaming wind before them. The fog and dust of the last few days had been followed by an unnatural clearness—each copse and fields and pond and lane in the country of the Four Roads stood sharply out, with inky tones in its colouring. The fields sweeping down from Sunday Street to Horse Eye were shaded from indigo almost to black, and on the marsh the slatting water-courses gleamed like steel on the heavy teal-green of their levels. The sea was drawn in a black line against a thick, unhealthy white sky, blotched and straggled with grey.

“It’ll rain before dusk,” said Harry. “It can’t hoald out much longer.”

“We’ll never git the field shocked, let alone brought in,” said Mus’ Beatup. “Here we’ve bin five hour and not maade more’n a beginning—it’s lamentaable. Reckon we might as well let the Germans beat us—we cudn’t have wuss weather.”

Harry set his teeth.

“We’ll git it finished afore the rain.”

“Afore your grandmother dies,” jeered Mus’ Beatup. “I’m off to the Volunteer.”

“And leave us.... Faather!”

“I’m not a-going to stay here catching my death wud rheumatics, working in the rain under my son’s orders. Reckon you’d sooner see me dead than lose your hemmed oats—my hemmed oats I shud say—but I—” and Mus’ Beatup swung up his chin haughtily—“have different feelings.”

“Reckon you have, and you ought to be ashaumed of yourself!” cried Harry thickly, then flushed in self rebuke, for on the whole he was a respectful son.

Mus’ Beatup sauntered away, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched to his ears—his usual attitude when he felt guilty but wanted to look swaggering. Mr. Sumption and Mr. Poullett-Smith were both at the further end of the field, and no opposition stood between him and the Rifle Volunteer save the doubtful quality his wife might offer from the kitchen window. Harry watched him with burning cheeks and a full throat. “Reckon I’m lik to kip temperance all my days wud this,” he mumbled bitterly.

He then went down to the other workers, and told them that it was going to rain and that they were a labourer short, as his father was feeling ill and had gone indoors to rest, but that he hoped by “tar’ble hard wark” to get the field cut before the storm. “If the grain’s shocked, it’ll bear the rain, but if it’s left standing, the rain ull beat down the straw, and all the seed ull fly. Juglery, you taake the reaper—Norry Noakes, you git to Tassell’s head—Mus’ Sumption and Elphick and I ull reap, and Mus’ Smith and Nell and Zacky bind.... Now I reckon ’tis a fight ’twixt us and them gurt clouds over Galleybird.”

Elphick and Juglery were inclined to grumble at having their dinner-hour cut short, and talked of judgments equally bestowed on “them wot bruk the Sabbath” and “them wot bruk up grass.” But Mus’ Sumption’s professional opinion was that the approaching storm was not in the nature of a punitive expedition—“If the Lord had wanted to spoil this harvest, He would have done it on Thursday or Friday; now all He’ll get is the tail-end, and not that if I can help it.”

He bent his huge back to the sickle, and worked for the next hour without straightening. Mr. Poullett-Smith decided to forget the Sunday-school he was supposed to catechise at three, and Nell to forget the headache which would probably have sent her off the field at the same hour. Norry Noakes and Zacky, seeing their deliverance nigh, put more energy into that afternoon than they had put into all four other days of harvest—Norry nearly dragged Tassell’s head off his neck in his efforts to make him go faster.

At about three o’clock, Mr. Sumption stood up and scanned the fields under his hand like Elijah’s servant watching for rain. Then he gave a shout that made everyone start and straighten their backs.

“Lo! the Lord is on our side—behold more labourers for the harvest.”

Two figures were coming down the field from Worge—Ivy Beatup and a soldier. Ivy wore a pink cotton dress, belling out all round her with the wind and flapping against the soldier’s legs. She also carried unexpectedly a pink parasol.

“Thought I’d come over and see you all!” she bawled as soon as she was within earshot. “This is Sergeant Eric Staples from Canada.”

... Canada! Then no doubt he knew a bit about harvesting. Harry went forward to meet them.

“Mother toald us you’d half the Sunk to reap before the weather,” said Ivy, at closer range, “so I said we’d come and give you a hand, surelye.”

“We’ll be unaccountable glad to have you both—the rain’s blowing up and we’re short of workers.”

“I’m on it, as the boys say, and so’s the Sergeant, I reckon.”

“Sure,” said Sergeant Staples, staring round him.

“Mother’s gitting a valiant supper fur us when ’tis all a-done. She says if you’ve bruk the Sabbath one way you may as well break it another and maake a good job of it. Thyrza’s coming, and is bringing all her tinned salmon. Wot do you think of my sunshade, Nell?—reckon it’s unaccountable smart,” and Ivy threw it down into the stubble and began rolling up her sleeves.

“It’s middling kind of you,” said Harry politely to Sergeant Staples.

“Only too glad—I’ve done a power of this work over in Sask. May I ask what this little buggy is?”—and he pointed to the nodding erection of old Juglery chaired above the reins that slacked on Tassell’s rump.

“That’s the reaper, surelye.”

The Canadian did not speak, but the puzzled look deepened on his face.

“Maybe you’ll taake a sickle, being handy-like?”

“Sure”—but when Harry gave him Mus’ Beatup’s discarded weapon he held it at arm’s length and scratched his head. Then he slid up to Ivy—

“Say, kid, I never heard before as in the old country they cut corn with a pocket-knife.”

However, he swung his tool handily, and with the two new workers, and the extra energy of the old, the reaping went forward at a pace which threatened the victory of those black clouds over Galleybird.

The wind blew in droning gusts, swishing in the corn, and fiddling in the boughs of Forges Wood. Dead leaves began to fly out of the wood, the threat of autumn. The men’s shirts blew against their skins, and the women’s skirts flew out; the colours of the field grew dim—the corn was white, the wood and the hedges were grey—only the clothes of the harvesters stood out in smudges of pink and blue. Then suddenly rain began to squirt down out of a black smeary sky like charcoal—the wind screamed, almost flattening the few last rods. No one spoke, for no voice could be heard above the howling of the wind. Rabbits began to pop out of the corn, but there were no hunting dogs, no shouting groups from the cottages come out to see the fun. When the last sickleful had been cut, and the reaper stood still, with old Juglery asleep on the seat, the harvesters picked up their coats and pulled down their sleeves without a word.

They were wet through—the muscles of the men’s bodies showed through their clinging shirts and the women were wringing their gowns. But the Sunk Field was reaped and Harry’s harvest saved. He had won his battle against his own ignorance, his father’s indifference, and the earth’s treacheries. He had vindicated his daring, and he would never know how small was the thing he had done—a few scrubby acres sown and reaped, a few mean quarters of indifferent grain gathered in—he would never hear Sergeant Staples say to Sergeant Speed of the North-West Provinces that he had spent a slack afternoon cutting mustard and cress with a pocket-knife.

Food was waiting up at the farm, with Thyrza Beatup, who, for obvious reasons now, had been unable to help with the harvest, but had done her best by contributing her entire stock of tinned salmon to the harvest-supper. The party began to move off, Mr. Poullett-Smith wrapping his coat over Nell’s shoulders with hands that perhaps strayed a little to touch her neck. Only Mr. Sumption was left, standing upright and stockish on the rise of the field, a huge black shape against the sky.

“Come along, Mus’ Sumption,” called Ivy, “and git a nice tea-supper. Thur’s tinned salmon and a caake.”

Mr. Sumption’s voice came to them on the scream of the wind—

“Shall I go without thanking the Lord of the Harvest for His mercies in allowing us to gather in the fruits of the earth on the Sabbath Day?”

“He’s praying,” said Nell, with a shiver of disgust in her voice.

The curate bit his lip.

“He’s perfectly right,” he said, and going up to the minister, he knelt down in the stubble. The others huddled in a sheepish group by the gate. Mr. Sumption’s prayer was blown over their heads, washed into the woods on the rain, but they could hear the groan of his big voice in the wind, and here and there a word of his familiar prayer-vocabulary.... “Lord ... day ... oven ... wicked ... righteous ... Satan ... save ... forgive.... Amen.”