Chapter THREE

There was some vexation at Brakey Bottom when it was discovered that Dan had become the conductor of the Uckfield ’bus, but there was really very little to be done in the way of protest, beyond words, which were plentiful. Besides, he was earning thirty shillings a week, fifteen of which he paid his mother; therefore he had solved the financial problem of those days.

The work was arduous, but he liked it--it was so personal ... and it involved the active, physical service which had always appealed to an officious element in him. Dan liked helping old women with heavy baskets, children on their way from school, mothers with large families inclined to spread about the ’bus. He also liked throwing out drunken men who tried to travel without a ticket--it was like old times at the George--and “sassing back” the people who rode on his ’bus and then scolded him because it wasn’t the ’bus for Chailey or Seaford. There was nothing aloof or detached or inhuman about conducting a ’bus, especially when it was a ’bus which jogged and meandered through country lanes, linking up farms and small villages, taking its regular freight of farm stuff and farm-people, as well as the interest of strangers, or a tramp with a few halfpence to spare for a ride.

Daniel’s day went by rule, or he never could have done in it as much as he did. Every morning he was up at six, to feed the pig and attend to any household jobs that, in his opinion, could not wait till Jess Harman appeared at the more reasonable hour of eight. Then on most mornings he would represent the village of Bullockdean at its altar. As he lived at the parsonage, it seemed natural that this function should be his more often than Tommy Pilbeam’s or Freddie Pont’s or other youths whose punctuality was more uncertain. It was rather a strain on his already over-filled day, but Dan would have done much more for Mr. Marchbanks, who had housed and fed him when his own family were reluctant to do so, and still bore with Thomas Helier’s crying o’nights.... So there stood Mr. Marchbanks looking rather like a big green beetle, and there knelt Daniel trying how much of the Confession he could say in one breath, and there behind them lay the darkness and emptiness of Bullockdean Church. It was bitterly cold, as they could not afford to have the heating on week-days, but he soon grew warm in the hurry back to the parsonage, with perhaps a turn at Jess Harman’s broom, or a few minutes at the fire with a sluggish kettle. Half an hour for breakfast and washing up--half an hour for the tramp into Newhaven--when he had saved some money he would buy a bicycle--and at nine o’clock he was incredibly at the Downs Motor Company’s office in Bridge Road, ready to start out on their first ’bus.

It was as well that he was warm and glowing with all his haste, for the overcoat with the brass buttons was not of the thickest material, and it was cold work standing on the back step of a ’bus in winter-time. They would take a few farm labourers out of Newhaven, men employed on farms outside the town, who could not find cottages near their work. These would be set down all along the road between Newhaven and Southease, and others picked up and carried on to the farms; for it was the same all over the district, and the old-time labourer’s right to live on the ground he tilled was lost and the loss accepted.

The ’bus did not take the direct route from Lewes to Uckfield, but an eccentric road of its own, looping to include villages a mile or so away--Ringmer and the Broyle--then turning abruptly north to East Hoathly, and up to Framfield by Iron Peartree. They were, as a rule, pretty empty by then, for it was past ten o’clock, and the farm-men were all at their work and the children were all in school, and it was too early for more casual road traffic. Between Framfield and Uckfield they might pick up a few early shoppers, but they often ran empty into the town. For half an hour the ’bus stood outside the Maiden’s Head, while Dan and the motor-man smoked their fags--then she went out again by Bird-in-Eye, generally well loaded. As she ran back through Hoathly and Ringmer her load increased, and she would often enter Lewes quite full. On market day there would be tremendous packs and crushes, and Dan would pull the bell, shouting: “Full up, please,” guarding the entrance with a sturdy arm.

They made this journey twice a day, leaving Newhaven at nine and three. In a week or so Dan knew every scrap of the road by heart, every hill, every haystack. He depended on the passengers for any variety in his day, and they themselves seemed to follow a well-worn rule--farm-men out of Newhaven, old women shoppers into Uckfield, young women shoppers into Lewes in the morning, and cinema-goers in the evening. Now and then there would be small excitements--once they took a wedding-party from Lewes to Rushy Green, the bride very shy, the bridegroom ashamed, and the guests uproarious; another time a young woman felt ill in the ’bus, and held Dan’s hand for a mile ... and there were always parcels that were left behind, and children that were sick, or had lost the pennies they had been given for their fares ... so altogether he found the life exciting, and felt pleasurably thrilled and tired when eight o’clock saw him back at Bullockdean, hungry for supper after his dinner of bread and cheese.

He had the whole of Wednesday afternoon off to attend to the garden, and his Sundays were always free, and spent at Brakey Bottom. Here he would console his mother, who smarted much under Christopher’s courtship of his Mary Wright, which took him away to Exceat Bridge every Sunday. Dan knew that her displayed affection was intended rather as a rebuke to one son than as a reward to the other, nevertheless, he rejoiced in those new caresses of provocation, and would give her in return those which were not coiners’ money, but the currency of true love. Of other comfort he could give but little, for the situation was outside his understanding. He was wounded and puzzled by his mother’s selfishness in trying to thwart her son in the chief business of a man’s life, and his own experience made it hard for him to realize a love which could be given to a wife only at the expense of a mother. Still, his whole philosophy and tendency was to take what he could get and be thankful, and he was glad to feel a little boy again with his head on his mother’s shoulder, even though he knew that her arm drew him really close only when Christopher came and stood in the doorway, staring at them with shadowed eyes.

The spare moments of the day were spent with Len, pottering round the farm and lending a sympathetic ear to his grievances--or else Ivy and Leslie would be waiting for him with their “Snakes and Ladders,” still only partly superseded by a race-game with motor-cars. Meanwhile Emmie “went over” Thomas Helier, as she put it--sewed on buttons and let down tucks, and otherwise repaired the omissions of the week. She would have taken charge of him altogether, but Dan was very insistent that he had “got used” to him, and at the end of the day invariably packed him into the push-cart and trundled him home. What would Jess Harman say, he wondered, if he came back without him? or Mr. Marchbanks, with all his strict notions on the duties of parents to children, which was what he always preached about, him being a bachelor, instead of the old-fashioned duties of children to parents that the village was used to. Or, for that matter, what would he say himself if he broke his one link with “_la chère épouse de Daniel Le Couteur_,” asleep under the ilex trees?--that golden Rose with the laughing name, whose love had given him no pain or fear or sorrow, but had grown up in his heart like a rose, and, like a rose, in death was still sweet.

No, he would not part with Thomas Helier, even to the kind Emmie, who would care for him better than either Jess Harman or his own father. He would wheel him home down the ruts of the Telscombe lane--if Len were too busy to put the mare to and give them a lift as far as the high road--and then down the road, almost in the ditch to avoid the great cars that swept by, till the sign-post pointed them once more into the by-ways. Then at last they would trundle between the lights of the George and the Crown, spilled together in one pool in the midst of Bullockdean Street, and find the rectory dark, with Mr. Marchbanks and Jess Harman still in church. Shut out by his possession of Thomas Helier both from church and tavern, Dan would take him into the kitchen, to the red gleeds of the fire, and put him into his cradle, while he heated his milk, and thought with equal regret of the beer he might have drunk and the hymns he might have sung.