FOUR roads in Sussex mark out a patch of country that from the wooded, sea-viewing hills behind Dallington slips down over fields and ponds and spinneys to the marshes of Hailsham and Horse Eye. The North Road, slatting the heights with its pale, hard streak, runs from far Rye to further Lewes, a road of adventures and distances, passing Woods Corner and Three Cups Corner, Punnetts Town and Cade Street, till it joins the London Road at Cross-in-Hand. The South Road borders the marsh, sometimes dry on the shelving ground above it, sometimes soggy on the marsh level, or perhaps sheeted with the overflow of the Hurst Haven. It comes from Senlac and Hastings, and after skirting the flats, crosses the River Cuckmere, and runs tamely into Lewes, where all roads meet. The East Road is short and shaggy, running through many woods, from the North Road, which it joins at Woods Corner, to the throws at Boreham Street. Along this road is a string of farms—Cowlease, and Padgham, and Slivericks, mangy holdings for the most part, with copses running wild and fields of thistles, doors agape and walls atumble, and gable-ends stooping towards the ponds. The West Road is grass-grown, and in July St. John’s wort and rest-harrow straggle in the ruts and make the dust smell sickly-sweet. It forks from the North Road at Punnetts Town, and runs through Rushlake Green and the Foul Mile to Hailsham in the south.

In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr. Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street, in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine, like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece.

As he walked he muttered to himself, and from time to time cracked the joints of his fingers with a loud rapping sound. These two habits helped form the local opinion that he was “queer,” an opinion bolstered by more evidence than is usual in such cases. Women standing in their cottage doors noticed him twice halt and stoop—once to pick up a beetle which was laboriously crawling from ditch to ditch, another time to pick up a swede dropped from some farm-cart. He carefully put the beetle on the opposite bank—“Near squashed you, my dear, I did. But He Who created the creeping things upon the earth has preserved you from the boot of man.” The swede he dusted and crammed in his pocket. It was known throughout the hamlets—the “Streets” and “Greens”—of Dallington Parish that the minister was as poor as he was unblushing about his poverty.

The evening was very still. Eddies and swells of golden, watery light drifted over the hills round Dallington. In the north the sharp, wooded hill where Brightling stood was like a golden cone, and the kiln-shaped obelisk by Lobden’s House which marked the highest point of South-east Sussex was also burnished to rare metal. The scent of water, stagnant on fallen leaves, crept from the little woods where the primroses and windflowers smothered old stumps in their pale froth, or spattered with milky stars the young moss of the year. At Woods Corner the smoke of a turf fire was rising from the inn, and there was a smell of beer, too, as the minister passed the door, and turned down the East Road towards Slivericks. The fire and the beer both tempted him, for there was neither at the Horselunges, the tumble-down old cottage where he lodged in Sunday Street. But the former he looked on as an unmanly weakness, the latter as a snare of the devil, so he swung on, humming a metrical psalm.

About a hundred yards below Woods Corner, just where the road, washed stony by the rains, runs under the webbing of Slivericks oaks, he turned into a field, across which a footpath led a pale stripe towards Sunday Street. From the top of the field he could look down over the whole sweep of country within the Four Roads, to the marshes and the sea, or rather the saffron and purple mists where the marshes and the sea lay together in enchantment. The yellow light wavered up to him from the sunset, over the woods of Forges and Harebeating; there was a sob of wind from Stilliands Tower, and a gleam of half-hidden ponds in the spinneys by Puddledock. Mr. Sumption stood still and listened.

The air was full of sunset sounds—the lowing of cows came up with a mingled cuckoo’s cry, there was a tinkle of water behind him in the ditch, and the soft swish of wind in the trees and in the hedge, nodding ashes and sallows and oaks to and fro against the light-filled sky. On the wind was a mutter and pulse, a throb which seemed to be in it yet not of it, like the beating of a great heart, strangely remote from all the gleam and softness of spring sunset, pale fluttering cuckoo-flowers, and leaf-sweet pools of rain. A blackbird called from the copse by Cowlease Farm, and his song was as the voice of sunset and April and pooled rain ... still the great distant heart throbbed on, its dim beats pulsing on the wind, aching on the sunset, over the fields of peaceful England dropping asleep in April.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption cracked his fingers loudly once or twice:

“You hear ’em pretty plain to-night ... the guns in France.”

2

He walked slowly on towards the stile, then stopped again and pulled a letter out of his pocket. It was a dirty letter, written on cheap note-paper with a smudged in indelible pencil.

“Dear Father,” it ran, “I reckon you’ll be wild when you get this. I have left the Fackory and have enlisted in the R. Sussex Regement. I could not stand that dirty tyke of Hubbard our forman any more. So I’ve gone, for I’m sick of this, and there’s no fear of my being fetched back, as I’m not satisfackory nor skilled in particular, and should have been fetched out anyhow all in good time, I reckon. So don’t go taking on about this, but please send me some fags, and I should like some chockolate, and get some of those kokernut buns at the shop with the crinkly paper round. It is a week since I did it, but I have been to the Y.M.C.A., and bought some Cherry-blossom boot-pollish and a packet of Players, and have no more money, and they said on a board ‘Write home to-night.’ Well, dear Father, I hope you will not take this too badly. Some good may come of it, for I am a soldier now and going to fight the Germans. Good-bye and don’t forget to send the things I said.

“Your loving son,

“Jerry.

“(467572 Pvte. Sumption, 9th Co. 18th Bn. R. Suss. Rejiment.)”

The minister crushed the letter back into the pocket already bulging with the swede. “O Lord,” he groaned, “why doth it please Thee to afflict Thy servant again? I reckon I’ve stood a lot on account of that boy, and there seems no end to it. He’s the prodigal son that never comes home, he’s the lost sheep that never gets into the fold, and yet he’s my child and the woman from Ihornden’s....” His mutterings died down, for he heard footsteps behind him.

A young man was crossing the field from Slivericks, a sturdy, stocky fellow, about five-and-a-half feet high, with leggings and corduroy riding-breeches, and a black coat which was a little too small for him and as he drew near sent out an odour of moth-killer—evidently some young farmer, unaccountably Sundified on a week-day evening.

“Hullo, Tom,” said the minister.

“Hullo, Mus’ Sumption.”

The boy stood aside for the older man to cross the stile. His head hung a little over the unaccustomed stiffness of his collar, and his eyes seemed full of rather painful thought. Mr. Sumption fumbled in his pockets, drew out the letter, the swede, a pencil without a point, a Testament, a squashed mass of chickweed, a tract, and finally a broken-backed cigarette, which he handed to Tom.

“Bad news, I reckon?”

Tom nodded.

“They woan’t let me off. I wur afeard they wouldn’t. You see, there’s faather and the boys left, and I couldn’t explain as how faather had bad habits. You can’t bite back lik that on your own kin.”

“No, you can’t,” and Mr. Sumption carefully smoothed a dirty scrap of paper as he put it back in his pocket. “By the way, my boy’s just joined up. I heard from him this morning. He’s in the Eighteenth Sussex—I shouldn’t wonder if you found yourselves together.”

“Lord, Mus’ Sumption! You doan’t tell me as he’s left the factory?”

“Reckon he has. Thought he’d like to fight for his King and country. He was always a plucked ’un, and he couldn’t bear to see the lads going to the front without him.”

There was a gleam in the minister’s eyes, and he cracked his fingers loudly.

“I’m proud of him—I’m proud of my boy. He’s done a fine thing, for of course he need never have gone. He’s been three years in munitions now, and him only twenty. He went up to Erith when he was a mere lad, no call for him to go, and now he’s joined up as a soldier when there was no call for him to go, neither.”

Tom looked impressed.

“Maybe I ought to be feeling lik he does, but truth to tell it maakes me heavy-hearted to be leaving the farm just now.”

“The Lord will provide.”

“I’m none so sure o’ that, wud faather and his habits, and the boys so young and wild, and the girls wud their hearts in other things, and mother, poor soul, so unsensible.”

“Well, what does the farm matter? Beware lest it become Naboth’s vineyard unto you. Is this a time to buy cattle and vineyards and olive-yards? This is the day which the Prophet said should burn like an oven, and the proud, even the wicked, be as stubble. What’s your wretched farm? Think of the farms round Ypers and Dixmood, think of the farms round Rheims and Arrass—Stop!” and he seized Tom’s arm in his hard, restless fingers—“Listen to those guns over in France. Perhaps every thud you hear means the end of a little farm.”

Tom stood dejectedly beside him, the broken-backed cigarette, for which the minister had unfortunately been unable to provide a light, hanging drearily from his teeth. The soft mutter and thud pulsed on. The sun was slowly foundering behind the woods of Bird-in-Eye, sending up great shafts and spines of flowery light into the sky which was now green as a meadow after rain.

“This war queers me,” he said, and his voice, low and thick as it was, like any Sussex countryman’s, yet was enough to drown the beating of that alien heart. “I doan’t understand it. I can’t git the hang od it nohow.”

“A lot of it queers me,” said Mr. Sumption, “and I reckon that in many ways we’re all as godless as the Hun. It’s not only the Germans that shall burn like stubble—it’s us. The oven’s prepared for us as well as for them.”

They were walking together down steep fields, the ground dreamy with grey light, while before them, beyond the sea, burned the great oven of the sunset, full of horns of flame.

“I’m thinking of the farm,” continued Tom, his mind sticking to its first idea. “I’m willing enough to go and fight for the farms in France and Belgium, but seems to me a Sussex farm’s worth two furrin’ ones. Worge aun’t a fine place, but it’s done well since I wur old enough to help faather—help him wud my head as well as my arms, I mean. Faather’s an unaccountable clever chap—you should just about hear him talk at the pub, and the books he’s read you’d never believe. But he’s got ways wot aun’t good for farming, and he needs somebody there to see as things doan’t slide when he can’t look after them himself.”

“Can’t your brother Harry do anything? He must be nearly sixteen.”

“Harry’s unaccountable wild-like. He’s more lik to git us into trouble than help us at all.”

“Maybe your father will pull-to a bit when you’re gone and he sees things depend on him.”

“Maybe he will, and maybe he woan’t. But you doan’t understand, Mus’ Sumption. You doan’t know wot it feels like to be took away from your work to help along a war as you didn’t ask for and don’t see the hang of. Maybe you’d think different of the war if you had to fight in it, but being a minister of religion you aun’t ever likely to have to join up. I’m ready to go and do my share in putting chaps into the oven, as you say, but it’s no use or sense your telling me as it doan’t matter about the farm, for matter it does, and I’m unaccountable vrothered wud it all.”

He grunted, and spat out the fag. Mr. Sumption, taking offence at once, waved his arms like a black windmill.

“Ho! I don’t understand, don’t I? with my only son just gone for a soldier. D’you think you care for your dirty farm more than I care for my Jerry. D’you think I wouldn’t rather a hundred times go myself than that he should go? O Lord, that this boy should mock me! You’ll be safe enough, young Tom. You’ve only the Germans to fear, but my lad has to fear his own countrymen too. The army was not made for gipsy-women’s sons. My poor Jerry! ... there in the ranks like a colt in harness. He’ll be sorry he’s done it to-morrow, and then they’ll kill him.... Oh, hold your tongue, Tom Beatup! Here we are in Sunday Street.”

3

Sunday Street was the lane that linked up Pont’s Green on the East Road with Bucksteep Manor at Four Throws. From the southern distance it looked like the street of a town, oddly flung across the hill—a streak of red houses, with the squat steeples of oasts, an illusion of shops and spires, crumbling on near approach into a few tumble-down cottages and the oasts of Egypt Farm. From the north you saw the chimneys first, high above the roofs like rabbits’ ears above their heads; then you tumbled suddenly upon the hamlet: the Bethel, the Horselunges, the shop, the inn whose sign was the Rifle Volunteer, the forge, the pond, the two farms—Worge and Egypt—with their cottages, and the farmstead of Little Worge sidling away towards Pont’s Green.

To-night it was fogged in the grey smoke of its own wood fires, with here and there on its windows the lemon green of the sky. It smelled faintly of wood-smoke, sweet mud and standing rain, of rot in lathes and tiles. The Horselunges, the cottage where the minister lodged, was the first house in the village after the forge. It stood opposite the Bethel, a brick, eighteenth-century building with big gaunt windows staring blindly over the fields to Puddledock. The Bethel had been built in Georgian days when the Particular Baptists flourished in greater numbers round Sunday Street, and a saint of theirs had built it to “the glory of God and in memory of my dear wife Susannah Odlarne, saved by Grace. For Many are called but Few are chosen.”

Mr. Sumption and Tom had walked the last of their way in silence. But the minister’s anger had fizzled out as quickly as it had kindled, and at the door of the forge he held out his hand very kindly to the boy.

“Well, good-night to you, lad. I must look in and see Bourner here for a minute or two. I hope your mother won’t be much distressed at your news.”

“Reckon she will, but it can’t be helped.... Funny, you doan’t hear the guns down here.”

“No more you do, but they’re going it just the same—knocking away little farms.”

Tom nodded with a wry smile and walked off. The minister turned into the forge.

Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from Galleybird or Harebeating, or even from the doors of sick people—if they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son.

His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof-parings and the ring of smitten iron. His sketchy education finished, he had taken his place beside his father at the anvil—he had held the meek tasselled hoofs of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment Day, he had swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent.

But during his adolescence strange things had grown with his bulk and girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching flames he came to see the presage of that day which should burn like an oven, the burning fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment a form of use. When the horse clumped out of the smithy with the new iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of God passed through fire into service.

He became “queer.” He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.

Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra Sumption, comely, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect, and emerged a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech. He was a great disappointment to his benefactor, for the smith in him had triumphantly survived all genteel training and theological examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness, his “queerness” remained as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity of his forge-born similes, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate and fume of the old Doomsday doctrines which were fast dying out of Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself.

In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood, where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her, as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both miserable for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They returned to the forge at Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual restless yearning of the Word within him, that drop of the divine which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.

At the close of the year Meridian Sumption died at the birth of her child. They had been ideally happy in their short married life, in spite of the cage-bars of circumstances and the drivings of the Word which divided them as in the beginning it had divided the waters from the earth. After her death he became “queerer” than ever. He roamed from village to village, preaching to farmers, gipsies, labourers, tinkers, all who would hear him and some who would not—leaving his child in his mother’s care.

Six years later the death of his father and mother made it necessary that he should take the boy—named grotesquely Jeremiah Meridian, as if to show his double origin in religion and vagabondage. At the same time his first patron, the minister of Bethersden, offered to recommend him for the pastorate of the Particular Baptist Chapel at Sunday Street near Dallington. His conscience had long grieved over the vagaries of his blacksmith saint, and in this empty pastorate he saw a way of settling both. Sumption had acquired a certain fame as a preacher among the ’dens of Kent, candidates for the Particular Ministry were not so many as they used to be, and the pastorate of Sunday Street, with its dwindling, bumpkin congregation, country loneliness, and small revenues, was hard to fill. After various difficulties, the new minister arrived with his black-eyed, swarthy child. He had grown tired of his wanderings, and had conceived an erratic, arbitrary affection for this pledge of gipsy love. He looked forward to a settled country life and to preaching the Word in his own Bethel.

The villagers, for the most part, liked him. His manners offended them, and as they were mostly Church-people they seldom came to his chapel except on wet Sundays, when it meant too much dirt and trouble to go to hear old Mr. Foxe at Dallington or young Mr. Poullett-Smith at Brownbread Street. But from the first he was as one of themselves, treated with no respect and much kindness. He was seldom invited to sick-beds or to officiate at funerals or marriages, but he never lacked an invitation to a Harvest Supper or Farmers’ Club Dinner. For his sake the neighbourhood tolerated the villainies of his Jerry, a throw-back to the poaching, roving, thieving Rossarmescroes. None the less, they were glad when at the outbreak of war he went to work in a munition factory, first in London, then, through a series of not very creditable wanderings, to Erith. Only the minister grieved, for he loved Jerry as he had loved no human thing since his mother died in the little apple-smelling room above the smithy. He was not always kind to the boy, and the arm which had wielded the hammer so lustily had on one or two shocking occasions nearly broken the bones he loved. But he had for his son a half-spiritual, half-animal affection, and the villagers pitied him when the boy went, though they were glad to see him go.

“Mus’ Sumption wur more blacksmith nor he wur minister,” they said when any local enthusiasm for him prevailed; and it was true that in his loneliness and anxiety he would often find comfort in the forge at Sunday Street, where he could sit and watch Bourner the smith swing his hammer, or even sometimes himself, with coat thrown off and shirt-sleeves rolled back over arms long and hairy as a gorilla’s, smite the hot iron or scrape the patient hoof, while his face grew red as copper in the firelight and the sweat ran over it and his shaggy chest.

To-night, when Jerry had wounded him afresh, he turned to his unfailing refuge. His pain was not the mere dread of death or maiming of the lad—it was something more sinister, more intangible. “The army is not for the gipsy woman’s son.” He feared for Jerry in that organised system of rank and order and command. He would have preferred him in the workshop even if the relative danger of the two places had been reversed. Jerry was less likely to be smashed by a German shell than by the system in which he had enrolled himself. He would break his head against its discipline, hang himself in its rules.... His dread for Jerry under martial law was the dread his Meridian’s ancestors would have felt for her under a roof. It was a fear based more on instinct than on reason, therefore all the more bruising to the instinctive passion of fatherhood. It was well that he had this refuge of iron and anvil, of hammer and hoof, this small comforting similitude of the day which should burn as an oven.... Bourner the smith did not talk to him much. He made a few technical remarks, and winked at his mate when Mr. Sumption boasted of Jerry’s valour in joining the army. But gradually the tired, careworn look on the minister’s face died away, his eyes ceased to smoulder and roll; in the thick stuffy atmosphere, strong with the smell of hoofs and the ammoniacal smell of hide and horses, grey with smoke and noisy with the roar of flames and the ring of iron, he was going back in peace to his father’s house, to the smithy at the throws by Bethersden, before the burdens of divine and human love had come down upon him.

4

After his companion had left him, Tom Beatup walked quickly down the lane, past the Horselunges and the Rifle Volunteer, to where Worge gate hung crooked across Worge drive, paintless and smeared with dew. Here he stopped a minute, and looked at the huddle of the farm. It was one black shape against the yellow of the sky, and the cones of its oasts and the spires of its poplars seemed part of its block, so that it looked grotesque and horned. He hesitated, rubbed his hand along the top of the gate and licked the dew off his fingers, then turned and walked eastward.

Beyond Egypt Farm and the cottages of Worge, just before the willow pond that marked the end of the street, stood the shop, where Thyrza Honey was “licensed to sell tobacco.” It was in darkness now, except for a faint creep of light under the door. Had Thyrza “shut up”? No—the handle turned, the little bell gave its buzzing ring, and the warm light ran out for a moment into the darkling lane—with a smell of tea and tobacco, sweets and sawdust, scrubbed floor and rotting beams, the smell that was to Tom the same refuge as the smell of the forge was to Mr. Sumption.

The shop was empty, but he could see a shadow moving to and fro across the little window at the back—a ridiculous little window, about a foot square, yet as gay with its lace curtains and pink ribbons as the drawing-room bow of a Brighton lodging-house. The next minute a face was pressed against it, then withdrawn, and the door at the back of the shop opened.

“Good evenun, Mus’ Tom.”

“Good evenun, Mrs. Honey.”

She moved slowly to her place behind the counter. All her movements were slow, which women sometimes found irritating, but never men, who were always either consciously or unconsciously aware of a kind of drawling beauty in her gait. She was fair, with hair like fluffy, sun-bleached grass. Her skin was like that of an apricot, soft and thick, of a deep creamy yellow, with soft dabs of colour on her wide cheek-bones.

“A packet of woodbines, please,” said Tom.

She reached them from the shelf behind her.

“Have you got any bull’s-eyes?”

“Yes—three-ha’pence an ounce.”

“They’ve got dearer.”

“And they’ll get dearer still, I reckon.”

“Give me three penn’orth, please.”

She took them out of a glass bottle at her elbow.

“Got any monster telephones?”

“I dunno—I’m afeard we’re sold out.”

Thyrza always spoke of herself in a business capacity as “we.” “Could you maake up two penn’orth? Harry and Zacky are unaccountable fond of them.”

“You’re a kind brother—buying sweeties for all the family. I reckon the bull’s-eyes are fur your sisters.”

“Reckon they are. No use giving monster telephones to girls—they can’t be eaten dentical.”

This was obvious when Thyrza finally unearthed the telephones in an old case under the ginger-beer box. They were long, black coiling strings of liquorice, requiring sleight of hand, combined with a certain amount of unfastidiousness, for their consumption. Tom was disappointed that Thyrza had found them so soon. He stood by the counter, fingering his purchases and wishing his money was not all gone.

“I hear you’ve bin up at the Tribunal,” said Thyrza, coming to the rescue.

“Yes—they woan’t let me off.”

“You’re sorry, I reckon.”

“Unaccountable. I doan’t know wot ull become of the farm.”

Thyrza sighed sympathetically, having nothing to say in the way of comfort.

“They said as how I wurn’t really indispensable, faather being able-bodied and having two lads besides me, and two ‘hands’”—he laughed bitterly. “I’d like to show ’em the ‘hands’—two scarecrows, you might say.”

“It’s a sad world,” remarked Thyrza comfortably.

Mrs. Honey was a widow, but never had more than a sentimental sigh for her husband who had made her miserable, and then suddenly rather proud—on that last day of October when the Royal Sussex had held the road to Sussex against the fury of the Prussian Guard, and Sam Honey died to save the home he had made so unhappy while he lived. He had died bravely and she was proud of him, but he had lived meanly and she could not regret him.

“Wot sort of a soldier d’you think I’ll make, Mrs. Honey?”

“A good one, surelye”—and she showed him teeth like curd.

“I’m naun so sure, though. I’m a farmer bred, and the life ull be middling strange to me.”

“Maybe you’ll lik it. Sam liked it fine. There was no end o’ fun to be had, he said, and foakes all giving you chocolate and woodbines, just as if you wur the king.”

“Will you send me a postcard now and agaun, Mrs. Honey?”

“Reckon I will.”

There was silence for a minute or two in the shop. The oil lamp swung, moving the shadows over the ceiling where the beams sagged with the weight of Thyrza’s little bedroom. A clock in the back room ticked loudly. Tom was still leaning across the counter, looking at Thyrza. They both felt rather awkward, as they often felt in each other’s company. Thyrza wondered when Tom was going. She liked him—liked him unaccountable—but her bit of supper was on the fire in the next room, there was some mending to be done, and many other odds and ends of feminine business before it was time to set the mouse-traps, put the milk-jug on the doorstep, and go to bed. Besides, she knew he ought to be going back to Worge to tell his family the news which should have been theirs before he brought it to her.

“I reckon your mother ull be wondering how you’ve fared this afternoon. Has your father gone home and told her?”

“I left faather at Woods Corner.”

“She’ll be worriting about him too, then.”

“Maybe I should ought to go home and tell them.”

He straightened himself with a sigh. He must leave his refuge of tea and soap and candles, the peace of Thyrza Honey’s slow movements and thick, sweet voice. She was sorry for him.

“You’ll look in again, Mus’ Tom?”

“Surelye.”

“Maybe you’ll bring your sister Ivy round for a cup of tea before you go. Ull you be going soon?”

“In a fortnight.... Good evenun, Mrs. Honey.”

“Good evenun, Mus’ Tom.”

Again the bell gave its buzzing ring, as he opened the door and went out.

5

Tom’s heart had sunk rather low before he came to Worge. He was always dissatisfied with himself after seeing Thryza. He never seemed able to find anything to say, just because she was the person he liked most in the world to talk to. He felt that he must be very different from the other men who came to see her—for men liked Thyrza—who could make even the buying of a penn’orth of sweets an occasion for artful sally and interesting conversation. That reminded him that he had left all his purchases on the counter. What an unaccountable fool he was! However, he would not go back for them. They must wait till to-morrow. Still, he wished he hadn’t left them. Thyrza would think him silly, and besides he had wanted to give those sweets to his brothers and sisters. He nearly always brought them something when he went into the town.

They were all at supper in the kitchen—he could hear their voices. He wondered if his father had come back yet. He had not, for the first question that greeted his entrance was:

“Whur’s your faather, Tom?”

“I left him at Woods Corner. I’d have thought he’d bin home by now.”

“Then you thought silly. ’T’aun’t likely as he’ll come home till they close. You should have stopped along of un.”

“I thought I’d better git back home and tell you the news.”

“And wot’s that? Have they let you off?”

“Not they. A fortnight’s final.”

Mrs. Beatup began to cry. She was a large, stout woman with masses of rough grey hair, and a broad, rather childish face, which now looked more like a child’s than ever as it wrinkled up for crying.

“Now, mother, doan’t you taake on,” said Ivy, the eldest girl, getting up and putting her arm round her.

“It’s a shaame, a hemmed shaame,” sobbed the woman. “No woander as faather’s stopped at Woods Corner. To take our eldest boy as is the prop and stay of the whole of us!”

“He aun’t no such thing,” said Ivy, who was a strapping girl—rather like her mother, except that her round face ended in a sharp chin, which gave her an unexpected air of shrewdness. The second girl, Nell, was helping her brother to his supper of pork and cabbage.

“No one can say he’s indispensable,” she remarked in rather a pretty, half-educated voice—she was pupil teacher in her second year at the school in Brownbread Street. “There’s Harry just on sixteen, and there’s Juglery and Elphick, and no one can say father isn’t a strong man and able to look after the farm.”

“Your faather’s no use. Tom, did you tell them as your faather had bad habits?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Tom sulkily, shovelling in the cabbage with his knife.

“Then you wur a fool. You know as your faather aun’t himself three nights out of five, and yet you go and say naun about it. How are they to know if you doan’t tell them?”

“I wurn’t going to tell all the big folk round Senlac as my faather drinks.”

“Hush, Tom! I never said as you wur to say that—but you might have let ’em know, careful like, as he aun’t always able to look after the farm as well as you might think.”

“It ud have done no good. Drunkenness aun’t a reason for exemption, as they say. Besides, I’d middling little to do in the matter. Faather was applying fur me, and he did all the talking—an unaccountable lot of it, too. I wurn’t took because there wurn’t enough said against it, I promise you. But seemingly before a farm chap like me gits off, he’s got to have a certifickit from the War Agricultural Committee, and they read a letter saying as they’d recommended one to be given, but the Executive Committee or summat hadn’t fallen in wud it. So there’s no use crying, mother, for go I must, and it’ll be none the easier for you making all this vrother.”

He was cross because he was unhappy.

“Will you be in the Royal Sussex, Tom—along of Mus’ Dixon and Mus’ Archie?” asked Zacky, the youngest boy.

“I dunno.”

“When ull you be leaving?”

“In a fortnight, I’ve told you.”

“I hear as how Bill Putland ull be going soon,” said Mrs. Beatup. “He’d be company like fur you, Tom.”

“Bill!—he’s too unaccountable fine and grand fur me. He thinks no end of himself being Mus’ Lamb’s chuvver. But I’ll tell you who’s joined the Sussex, though, and that’s Jerry Sumption. I met Mus’ Sumption, this evenun, and he toald me.”

“You doan’t mean to say as Jerry’s left the fackory?”

“Yes. He went and enlisted—minister says he’s unaccountable proud of him.”

There was a crackle of laughter round the table.

“Well, we all of us know, and I reckon minister knows as we know, that if Jerry had bin any sort of use at the munititions they wouldn’t have let him join up. It’s a law that if you maake munititions you doan’t have to join up.”

“Oh, Jerry’s bin never no good at naun. He’s jest a roving gipsy dog.”

Mrs. Beatup turned suddenly to Ivy:

“Did you know aught of this?”

“Not I!” said Ivy carelessly. “Jerry hasn’t written to me fur more’n a month. Maybe this is why.”

“I’m justabout sorry fur Mus’ Sumption,” said Tom, whom his supper had put in better humour. “He has a feeling as Jerry ull come to no good in the army.”

“No more he will, nor nowhere, I’m thinking,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Doan’t you never have naun to do wud him, Tom. I doan’t want my children to git the splash of that gipsy muck——” And she threw another half-defiant, half-furtive look at Ivy.

“Where’s Harry?” asked Tom.

“Out ratting,” Zacky informed him.

“Well, he woan’t find any supper’s bin kept fur him, that’s all,” said Mrs. Beatup, rising and pushing back her chair. “Nell, put the plaates on the tray and maake yourself useful fur wunst.”

A flush crept over Nell’s pale, pretty face, from her neck to the roots of her reddish hair. She gingerly picked up two of the smelly, greasy plates, then quickly put them down again.

“There’s faather.”

“Where?” Mrs. Beatup listened.

“I heard the gate—and there goes the side door.”

The next minute a heavy, uncertain footstep was heard in the passage, then a bump as if someone had lurched into the wall. The family stood stock-still and waited.

“Maybe he’ll hurt himself in the dark,” said Mrs. Beatup, “now policeman woan’t let us have the light at the passage bend.”

“No, he’s all right. There he is scrabbling at the door.”

There was the sound of fingers groping and scratching. Then the door opened and the farmer of Worge came in, his hat a little on one side, a lock of hair falling over his red forehead, and the whole of his waistcoat undone. He stood, supporting himself against the doorpost, and glared at the family.

“Your supper’s still hot, Ned,” said Mrs. Beatup hesitatingly—“leastways, the gals have eaten all the taters, but I can hot you up....” She began to whimper as the bleared grey eyes slowly rolled towards her.

“Be quiet, Mother,” said Ivy.

Mus’ Beatup, slowly and carefully, made his way towards a broken-springed armchair beside the fire. He then sat down by the simple process of falling into it backwards; then he stretched out a foot that seemed made of clay and manure——

“Taake off my boots, Missus.”

6

It was quite dark before Tom was able to slip out to see to one or two odd jobs that wanted doing in the barns. He felt himself obliged to stay in the kitchen while his father was there, for though there had not been more than a few occasions when surliness had blazed into assault, he knew that it was always just possible that his father might become violent, especially as his mother always went the worst way—with tears, reproaches, arguments and lamentations. What would happen when he was no longer at hand to watch over her he did not like to think. It was all part of the load of anxiety and love which was settling down on him.

If he had been a free man he would probably have felt quite ready for the change ahead of him. Though his imagination had scarcely taken hold of the war, and though the harrow and the plough, with the thick sucking earth on his boots, and the drip of rain or stew of sunshine on waiting fields, had absorbed most of the boyish spirit of adventure which might have sent him questing out of stuffier circumstances—though his was the country heart, which is the last heart for warfare—in spite of all, he might have gone gaily to the new life, with its wider reach and freedom, if he had not known that his departure meant the crumbling of that little corner of England which was his, which his arm had built and his back supported.

He knew that Worge leaned on him, for he felt the weight of it even in his dreams. It was four years now since he had put his shoulder against it; he was only just twenty, but he knew that if four years ago he had not made up his mind to save the farm, his father would have drunk, and the rest of the family muddled, the place into the auction market, and the Beatups would now be scattered into towns or soaking their humble-pie in beer on smallholdings. He had done nothing very wonderful. The place was small and no more wanted a giant to hold it up than a giant to knock it down. He had merely worked while others slacked, thought while others slept, remembered while others forgot. But, without any thrill of pride or adventure, he knew that he had tided Worge through its bad hour, and that the same little upheld it now. He was the real farmer, though he had to be careful not to let his headship be seen. His father had not explained things clearly to the tribunal—explaining things clearly was not a quality of Tom’s either—he had been far too anxious to preserve his own importance, which might have suffered had he said, “My son runs the farm while I’m drinking at the pub.”

The others were not even as much good as his father. In the intervals of drinking, which in spite of Mrs. Beatup’s three-in-five calculation were often quite respectable, he was both hard-working and resourceful, though of late his brain had grown spongier and threatened a final rot. But the rest of the family had no upstanding moments. Ivy was strong and comparatively willing, but Tom did not believe in girls as farm-hands and never thought of Ivy even milking the cows. She and her mother looked after the chickens and did the housework, that was all. Nell was out all day and busy working in the evenings for her examination; Zacky was still at school, and Harry was a rover—the comrade of other farmers’ younger sons in ratting and sparrow-hunting, in visiting fairs, in trespassing for birds’ eggs, or sometimes solitary in strange obedience to the call of distant wood or village green. Yet Harry was Tom’s one hope—a last, forlorn one.

Tom was waiting for him now. He wanted to speak to his young brother alone, not in the dim lath-smelling bedroom where Zacky would be a third. Harry did not generally stop out late, though he had occasionally roamed all night—hunger and fear of a beating (another of Tom’s quasi-paternal tasks) usually brought him home just in time to satisfy one and escape the other.

Tom looked into the cowshed—one of the cows had shown ailing signs that day, but she seemed well enough now, with her large head lolling against the stall, her eyes soft and untroubled in the brown glow of his lantern. He would not see the calf which had caused him so much half-proud anxiety; he wondered what would become of them both if it should be born on one of Father’s “bad nights.” Then he went into the stable, where the three farm-horses—the sorrel, the brown, and the bay—stood stamping and chumbling, with the cold miasmic air like a mist above the straw. Then he went back into the yard—saw that the hen-house door was fast, that old Nimrod the watch-dog had his bone and his water and a good length of chain. It was very cold, there was a faint smell of rime on the motionless air, and the stars were like spluttering candles in the frost-black sky. These April days and nights were unaccountable tricky, he told himself. That noon the very heart of the manure-heap had melted in the sun, and now it was hardening again—his boot hardly sank into the stuff as he trod it with his heel. Some of it ought to be carted to-morrow and put round the apple-trees....

Harry was very late. He would go into the corn-chamber and do some accounts. He was clumsy with his figures, and they kept him there twisting and scratching his head till nearly ten o’clock, when he heard a footfall, would-be stealthy, on the stones.

He rose quickly and ran round the yard to the backdoor just as a shadow melted up against it.

“Here—you!” cried Tom surlily, for he was tired and muddled with his sums—“doan’t you think to go slithering in quiet lik that, you good-fur-naun.”

“I’ll come in when I like,” grumbled Harry. “You aun’t maaster here.”

“Well, I’m the bigger chap, anyways, so mind your manners. Where’ve you bin?”

“Only down to Puddledock.”

“Puddledock aun’t sich a valiant plaace as you shud spend half a day there. You’ve bin up to no good, I reckon. A fine chap you’ll be to mind Worge when I’m gone.”

“You’re going, then?”

Harry’s voice was anxious, for he was fond of Tom, though he resented his interference with his liberties.

“Yes—I’m going ... join up in a fortnight. Come in, Harry; I want to spik to you.”

“I want my supper.”

“You’ll have your supper, though you doan’t desarve it, you spannelling beggar. I’ll come and sit along of you; we must talk business, you and I.”

“About Worge?”

“Yes.”

They were in the kitchen now, dark except for some gleeds of fire. The rest of the family had gone to bed, but the broken supper was still on the table—the hacked, hardening loaf, and the remains of the bacon and cabbage under floating scabs of grease. Tom lit the lamp and Harry sat down, hungry and uncritical. The two boys were curiously alike, short and sturdy, with broad sunburnt faces, grey eyes, big mouths, and small, defiant noses. Harry’s coat was covered with clay all down one side, and the sleeve was torn—Tom was too heavy-hearted for more scolding, just noted drearily a new item of expenditure. The younger brother saw the elder’s cast-down looks:

“I’m unaccountable sorry, Tom,” he said sheepishly.

“Cos of wot? Cos I’m going or cos you aun’t worth your bed and keep?”

“Cos of both.”

“Well, there’s naun to do about one, but a sight to do about t’other. Harry, you’ll have to mind Worge when I’m agone.”

“Wot can I do?”

“You can work instead of roaming, and you can see to things when faather’s bad—see as there aun’t naun foolish done or jobs disremembered. Elphick and Juglery have only half a head between them. Before I go I’ll tell you all I’ve had in my head about the hay in Bucksteep field, and the oats agaunst the Street and them fuggles down by the Sunk. And you’ll have to kip it all in your head saum as I’ve kipped it in mine, and see as things come out straight by harvest. D’you understand?”

“Yes, Tom.”

“And there’s Maudie’s calf due next month, and a brood of them Orpingtons, and I’d meant to buy a boar at Lewes Fair and kip him for service. You’ll never have the sense to do it. You mun stop your ratting and your roving, or Worge ull be at the auctioneer’s. Faather’s a valiant clever chap when he’s sober, and book-larned too, but the men are two old turnup-heads, and Zacky’s scarce more’n a child, and the gals are gals—so it’s up to you, Harry, as they say, to kip the plaace going.”

Harry groaned——

“Why wudn’t they let you stay?”

“Because they didn’t see no sense in kipping an a man on farm-work when there wur plenty about to do his job. They doan’t understand how things are, and when you coame to think of it, it’s a shaum as I can’t go wud a free heart.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I dunno. I aun’t got the chance of knowing, wud all this vrothering me. But I’d go easier if I cud think the plaace wouldn’t fall to pieces as soon as I left it, and that if I’m killed....”

He stopped. Strangely enough, he had never thought of being killed till now.

7

Tom’s calling-up papers did not arrive till a few days later. It was a showery morning, with a flooding blue sky, smeethed and streaked with low floats of cloud. The rain was cracking on the little green panes of the kitchen window, and the spatter of the drops, with the soft humming song of the kitchen fire, was in Tom’s ears as he studied the sheet which entitled one horse, one bicycle, one mule, one (asterisked) private soldier to travel cost-free to Lewes. He opened his mouth to say, “My calling-up papers have come,” but said nothing, just sat with his mouth open. The shower rattled and the fire hummed, then a sudden spill of sunshine came from the dripping edge of a cloud into the room, making the drops on the pane like golden beads, and lighting up the breakfast table, so that the mangled loaf and the dirty cups became almost as wonderful as the shining faces round them.

Mus’ Beatup was himself this morning—they still called it “himself,” though of late his real self had seemed more and more removed from the lusty headacheless man who sat among them to-day, more and more closely coiled with that abject thing of sickness and violence which came lurching down the fields at dusk from the Rifle Volunteer. He was studying his share of the post—an invitation to an auction at Rushlake Green, where Galleybird Farm was up for sale with all its live and dead stock. Mrs. Beatup had never had a letter in her life, nor apparently wanted one. She always exclaimed at the post, and wondered why Ivy should have all those postcards. In her young days no one sent postcards to girls. If a chap wanted you for wife he hung around the gate, if he did not want you for wife he took no manner of notice of you. A dozen chaps could not want Ivy for wife—her with as many freckles as a foxglove, and all blowsy too, and sunburnt as a stack—and yet there were nearly a dozen postcards strewn round her plate this morning. Some were field postcards, whizz-bangs, from Sussex chaps in France, some were stamped with the red triangle of the Y.M.C.A., some were views of furrin Midland places where Sussex chaps were in training, and some were funny ones that made Ivy throw herself back in her chair, and show her big, white, friendly teeth, and laugh “Ha! ha!” till the others said, “Let’s see, Ivy,” and the picture of the Soldier come home on leave to find twins, or the donkey chewing the Highlander’s kilt, or the Kaiser hiding in a barrel from “Ach Gott! die Royal Sussex!” would be passed round the table. To-day one of the pictures of the gentleman with twins—it was a popular one in the Sussex, and Ivy had two this morning—was from Jerry Sumption.

“Says he’s fed up,” said Ivy. “He reckons I knew about his joining. How was I to know? He’s at Waterheel Camp; and he’s met Sid Viner and young Kadwell. They kip those boys far enough from home.”

“And a good thing too,” said Mrs. Beatup. “We doan’t want Minister’s gipsy spannelling round.”

“Spik for yourself, mother—there aun’t a lad at Waterheel as I wuldn’t have here if I cud git him.”

“You’ll come to no good,” grumbled her father, and pretty Nell, with her anÆmic flush, shrugged away from her sister’s sprawling elbow. She herself had had only one postcard, which she slipped hastily into the front of her blouse—unlike Ivy, who left hers scattered over the table even when the family had risen from their meal. There was not much in the postcard to justify such preferential treatment, for it ran—“There will be a meeting of the Sunday-school teachers to-morrow in church at 5.30. H. Poullett-Smith.”

Nell began to collect her books for school. She carefully dusted the crumbs from her skirt, smoothed her pretty marigold hair before the bit of mirror by the fireplace, put on her hat and jacket, and was gone. The rest of the family began to disperse. Zacky had to go to school too, but his going was an unwilling, complicated matter compared with Nell’s. His mother had to find his cap, his sister to mend his bootlace, his father to cuff his head, and finally his brother Tom to set him marching with a kick in his rear.

Ivy tied on a sacking apron and began to slop soapsuds on the floor of the outer kitchen, Mrs. Beatup set out on a quest—which experience told would last the morning—after a plate of potatoes she could have sworn she had set in the larder overnight. Mus’ Beatup went off to his fields with Harry at his tail, and calling to Tom—

“Have you bin over to Egypt about them roots?”

“No—I’m going this mornun.”

“Then you can tell Putland as it’s taake or leave—he pays my price or he doan’t have my wurzels.”

“Yes, Father.”

Tom went off very quietly, fingering the summons in his pocket. How many times now would he go on these errands to Egypt, Cowlease, Slivericks and other farms? His father would have to go, or if unfit, then Harry would be sent—Harry who would sell you a cart of swedes for tuppence or exchange a prize pig for a ferret. That was an unaccountable queer little bit of paper in his pocket. He could tear it in two, but it could also do the same for him, and in any conflict it must come out winner. It was, as it were, a finger of that invisible hand which was being thrust down through the clouds to grab Tom and other little people. The huge, unseen, unlimited, unmerciful force of a kingdom’s power lay behind it, and Tom’s single body and soul must obey without hope of escape the great Manhood that demanded them both, as a potter demands clay and scoops up the helpless earth to bake in his oven....

All this in a more or less rag-and-tag state was passing through his mind as he walked down the drive of Worge, with Speedwell a-bloom between the ruts, and came to the Inn whose painted sign was a volunteer of Queen Victoria’s day. It was an old house, with a huge windward sprawl of roof, but had not been licensed more than sixty years. Tom disliked it as a temptation which Providence had tactlessly dumped at their door. If Mus’ Beatup had had to walk to the Crown at Woods Corner or the George at Brownbread Street he would have been more continuously the smart, upstanding man he was this morning.

Egypt Farm was just across the road. It was smaller than Worge, but also brighter and more prosperous-looking. There was new white paint round the windows and on the cowls of the oasts, and the little patch of garden by the door was trim, with hyacinths a-blowing and early roses spotting the trellis with their first buds.

“Mornun, Tom,” called Mrs. Putland cheerily. She was putting a suet pudding into the oven, with the kitchen door wide open, and saw him as he crossed the yard.

“Mornun, ma’am. Is the maaster at home?”

“Maaster’s over at Satanstown buying a calf. Can I give him your message?”

“Faather says as it’s taake it or leave it about them roots.”

“Then I reckon he’ll taake it. He never wur the man to higgle-haggle, and the roots is good roots.”

“Justabout valiant—I never got a tidier crop out of Podder’s field.”

Mrs. Putland had come to the door and stood looking at him, with her arms akimbo. She was a small, trim woman, buttoned and sleeked, and somehow the expression of her face was the same as the expression of the house—the clean, kindly, enquiring look of Egypt with its white-framed staring windows and smooth, ruddy tiles.

“It’ll be unaccountable sad fur your faather to lose you. You’ve bin the prop-stick of Worge this five year.”

“Can’t be helped. I’ve got to go. Had my calling-up paapers this mornun.”

“That’s queer. So did Bill. Reckon you’ll go together.”

“Didn’t Bill try fur exemption, then?”

“No—Mus’ Lamb wouldn’t have it. Besides, there wurn’t no reason as he should stay. We’ve done wudout him here since he went to the Manor, and Mus’ Lamb ull kip his plaace fur him till he comes back.”

Tom envied Bill his free heart.

“I’ll give him a call,” continued Bill’s mother. “He aun’t due up at the Manor fur an hour yit, and he wur saying only last night as he never sees you now.”

A few minutes later Bill answered his mother’s call, and sauntered round the corner of the house, his hands in his pockets, his chauffeur’s cap a little on one side. He had a handsome, fresh-coloured face, strangely cheeky for a country boy’s, and Tom always felt rather ill at ease in his presence, a little awed by the fact that though his hands might sometimes be brown and greasy with motor-oil, his body was of a well-washed whiteness unknown at Worge.

“Hullo, Bill.”

“Hullo, Tom.”

There had never been a very deep friendship between them; Bill was inclined to be patronising, and Tom both to resent it and to envy him. But to-day a new, mysterious bond was linking them. In the pocket of Bill’s neat livery there was a paper exactly like that in Tom’s manure-slopped corduroys.

“I hear you’ve bin called up, Bill.”

“Yes—in a fortnight, they say.”

“I’m going too—in a fortnight.”

“Pleased?”

“No. I’m unaccountable vrothered at leaving the farm. Wot d’you feel about it?”

“Oh, me?—I’m not sorry. They’ll keep my place open for me at the Manor, and I shall like getting a hit at Kayser Bill. Besides, the gals think twice as much of you if you’re in uniform.”

This was a new complexion on the case, and Tom’s thoughts wandered down to the shop.

“I shall like being along of Mus’ Archie, too—he told me I could be along of him. We’re all eighteenth Sussex hereabouts. I reckon you’ll be in with us.”

“I dunno.”

Tom’s brows were crinkled, for he was thinking hard. He was chewing the fact that for a free man there might be something rather pleasant in soldiering. This happy, conceited, self-confident little chauffeur was teaching him that the soldier’s lot was not entirely dark. “Called up”—“taken”—“fetched along”—those were the words of his conscript’s vocabulary. But now for the first time he saw something beyond them, a voluntary endeavour beyond the conscript’s obedience, a corporate enthusiasm beyond his lonely unwillingness. “We’re all eighteenth Sussex hereabouts....”

8

April was May before Tom’s weeks of grace had run. The field hollows were white with drifts of hawthorn, and the pale purplish haze of the cuckoo-flower had given place to the buttercups’ dabble of gold. The papery-white of the wild cherry had gone from the woods, which were green now, thick, and full of the nutty smell of leaves. The ditches were milky with fennel, and on the high meadows by Thunders Hill the broom and the gorse clumped their yellows together, making the hill a flaming cone to those who saw it from the marshes of Horse Eye.

The farmers of Dallington watched their hayfields rust. There was little corn in that country bounded by the Four Roads, so as the sun climbed higher noon by noon, the neighbourhood grew gipsy-brown—the straw-coloured feathers of the grass veiled a glowing heart of clover, and above them opened the white ox-eyes and pools of sorrel....

Tom Beatup watched ripen the fields whose harvest he would not see. There were some twenty acres of hay at Worge, and two fields in which the green corn was his hope and dread. The crop was promising on the whole—a bit sedge-leaved perhaps, but firm in its seed. There were the hops, too, in the low fields by Puddledock, where Forges Wood shut off the north-east wind. He trundled the insect-sprayer round the bines, and afterwards loved the smell of his green, sticky hands.

He would have been rightly offended if anyone had told him that his chief pangs of parting were for the farm. None the less, there was a lingering wistfulness in his last dealings with it which was not in his intercourse with his family. He loved his mother, he admired his father, he felt for his brothers and sisters an elder brother’s half-anxious, half-contemptuous fondness; but in his last services for Worge, whether in field or barn, there was something almost sacramental. His duties were rites—he was the unconscious priest of that tumble-down altar before which the manure smoked as incense and on which the burnt-offering of his boyhood lay.

He had, too, a hunger for the fields, not only the fields of Worge, but for all those within the Four Roads—which he did not see as roads leading to adventure, but as boundaries fencing home. When his tasks allowed he would roam in the webbing of tracks that the farms have spun between the lanes—he would go to Starnash or Oxbottom Town, watch the lightless sky grow purple over Muddles Green, and the big stars begin to spark it as the moon hung like a red lamp above Mystole Wood. High on the zenith the sky would be rainy green, and he would watch it deepen to purple round the crimson moon, all unconscious of its beauty, loving it only because it hung above this clay in which his feet were stuck, because from it came the brightness which waked the homely things he had put in the earth to sleep....

Sometimes he would be disturbed by another quest, and would beat slowly up and down on the road outside the shop, longing to go in and yet strangely reluctant. He felt all tied-up and dumb. He could not tell Thyrza Honey what he felt at leaving her any more than he could have told Starnash or Thunders Hill—than he could have told the little brother who lay against him on cold nights—or the dreamy-eyed cows he milked—or even the grinning, whining watch-dog who muddied him with his love. He was dumb, as all these were dumb. He felt unaccountable vrothered at having to leave them all, and that was the utmost he could say; and yet he knew that in Thyrza’s case, at any rate, it was not enough. A man with a better tongue than he would have gone into that shop, and shut himself into the light and tea-smelling warmth, instead of pacing up and down under the cold stars.