So on Harry, sixteen years old, with little or no experience, and a bad character to live down, fell the task of bringing Worge into line with a national endeavour. It was strange how his earthy imagination had taken fire at the new idea, and a curious justification of the Press. A sense of patriotism had wakened in him, as it had not wakened in Tom after nearly a twelve-month’s service. Tom was no longer indifferent or unwilling, but his enthusiasm scarcely went beyond the regiment—the feeling of “Sussex chaps”—the idea of fighting for Worge, or, at the most abstract, “having a whack at Kayser Bill.”
He had been in France about three months now. He had not been sent over as soon as he expected, but in November there had been a big draft from the 18th Sussex, including Tom and Jerry and Bill, also Mus’ Archie—Mus’ Dixon, who had been badly gassed on the Somme, stayed behind in charge of “School,” and rumour said that he would not be sent out again. So far Tom seemed to have had a far duller time abroad than in England; he had not so much as seen a German; and his letters home were chiefly about mud. The family jealously hinted that his letters to Thyrza Honey were more entertaining. However, he kept his promise to Harry, and sent him councillor postcards now and again. The last had consisted of just one word—“spuds!”
That was the spring when potatoes were being sold at sixpence a pound in Eastbourne and Hastings, and such inducements were held out to growers, that instead of the usual modest half-acre, Harry intended to make potatoes part of his new scheme. The two-acre was in potash this year, also the home field, and Harry decided to break up the pasture-land next the orchard. Some of the space would have to be used for roots—swedes and wurzels—but there would be a spud-growing such as Worge had never seen in its history.
Then there was the more ticklish problem of the grain, and what kinds to sow. Harry took Tom’s advice and decided on Sandy oats for the Street field and the field next the Volunteer. In the home field he would grow awned wheat—and red spring wheat on the reclaimed tillage of the Sunk Field.
Then came the problem of which grass-lands to break up. If only Tom had been there to advise him! He dare not ask his father, in case he should withdraw his first permission. Breaking up grass-land is heresy to an orthodox farmer, and it was quite possible that Mus’ Beatup would change his mind when it came to the crisis. For this reason Harry said no more about it, and planned craftily to start work on one of his father’s “bad days,” when he would not be likely to interfere. Left without counsel, he decided to break up the rest of the Sunk Field, also Forges Field, and an old pasture at the Bucksteep end of the farm. These were wretched soils and would have to be heavily manured; but none of the soils round Worge was really good, and some decent grass must be left for the cows and ewes. Manures were scarce and dear, owing to the war, but Harry thought he could make shift with the farmyard dung, supplemented by a little night-soil, and a ton of waste from the gypsum mines near Robertsbridge.
All this cost him more thinking than he had ever done in his life. Once or twice he lay awake from bed-time till dawn, adding up figures, working out ways and means, and making plans for settling any opposition, drunk or sober, from Mus’ Beatup. His responsibility was enormous, but he was at bottom too simple-minded to feel the full weight of it, and his enthusiasm flamed as clear as ever. By crabbed and common means—even the smudgy columns of a provincial newspaper—the vision had come to a country boy’s heart, and found there a divine, undeveloped quality of imagination, and an undisciplined power of enterprise. These two, which had hitherto united to keep him from his work, were now forged together in the heat of the new idea. But for the first he would never have heard the call, and the second alone made it possible that he should obey it.
Harry could not help laughing at the faces of Juglery and Elphick when he told them he meant to plough the Sunk Field.
“Br?ak up grass, Mus’ Harry!”
“Surelye! They’re asking farmers all over the country to grow more wheat.”
“Does Maaster know as you mean to plough the Sunk?”
“Reckon he does. I cud never do it wudout he let me.”
“Well,” said old Juglery, “I’ve bin on farm-work man and boy these dunnamany year, and I’ve only bruk up grass two times, and no good come of it, nuther. Wunst it wur fur oald Mus’ Backfield up at Odiam, him wot caum to nighe a hundred year, and then took a fit last fall and died of joy when he heard as wheat wur ninety shillings a quarter. T’other wur pore young Mus’ Pix of the Trulilows, and he bruk up a valiant pasture, and the oats caum up crawling about like pease, and each had a gurt squlgy root lik a pertater. I says to him, being young and joking like in those days, ‘You’re unaccountable lucky,’ says I, ‘to grow pease and pertaters on the same stalk,’ but he took it to heart, and went and shot himself in the oast. So you see as boath the yeomen I bruk up grass fur died, one o’ joy and t’other o’ sorrow.”
“Well, I shan’t die of nuther, and we’ll have the plough out Thursday if the weather hoalds.”
The men were getting used to being ordered about by Harry. Mus’ Beatup’s chill had gone off in a twisting bout of rheumatism, which returned every now and then with damp weather. He spent, therefore, a good deal of time in the house, with sometimes a hobble as far as the Rifle Volunteer, appearing only in the dry, frosty weather when little could be done with harrow or plough. However, when neighbouring farmers began to remark on the enterprise of Worge, he was careful to take the credit to himself—indeed he almost fancied that it was his own doing, for Harry, who could have done nothing without his authority, was careful to consult him on every occasion, and it was Mus’ Beatup who ordered the grain and checked the accounts, with many groans and dismal foretellings.
Those were good days for Harry, behind his plough. Under the soft grey spring sky, rifted and stroked by wandering primrose lights, through the damp air that smelled of living mould, over the brown earth that rolled and sprayed like a wave from the driving coulter, he toiled sweating in the raw March cold. The smell of earth, the smell of his own sweat, the smell of the sweat of his horses hung thick over the plough, but every now and then soft damp puffs of air would blow into the miasma the fragrance of grass and primrose buds, of sticky, red, uncurling leaves, and the new moss in the woods. The share gleamed against the dun, and the brown twigs of the copses drew their spindled tracery against a sky which was the paler colour of earth—sometimes a shower would fall, slanting along the hedges, the thick drops tasting on Harry’s lips of the unfulfilled spring.
His work made him very tired. After all, he was barely seventeen, and though sturdy had only just begun to use his strength. The work of the farm was much increased by the new plan, yet it was impossible to bring extra hands to it, except occasionally by the conscription of Zacky. Harry milked and ploughed and scattered and dug, rising in the foggy blue darkness of the morning, and often sitting up late over calculations and accounts. Elphick and Juglery gave a pottering, rheumatic service, Mus’ Beatup could only be irregularly relied upon. So in time Harry learned what it was to doze off out of sheer weariness over his supper, or fall across the bed asleep before he had pulled his trousers off. But strangely enough, he found the life no hardship. Before the first thrill of enterprise had passed he was beginning to like the work for its own sake. There was a new keen pleasure in the wearing of his muscles, almost a physical luxury in his fatigue, and the lying with spread limbs before the fire of evenings. His life seemed good and full—everything was worth while, eating or sleeping or toiling or resting. For the earth sometimes makes of her servants lovers.
He was far too busy during his working hours and weary during his leisure to find much temptation in his old errant pleasures. Willie Sinden appealed in vain to a grimy, sweaty Harry asleep for an hour before the fire at night—he was too unaccountable wearied to vrother about ratting or Willie’s new ferret; and he went to Senlac and Heathfield and Hailsham Fairs to sell beasts, not to drink ginger-beer or pot into the German Kaiser’s mouth in the shooting-gallery. Even the distant woods had ceased to call, for Harry was now tasting their adventure in his daily work. The chocolate furrows of the Sunk Field were part of that same wonder which had teased him in the fluttering hazels of Molash Spinney or the wind in the gorse-thickets of Thunders Hill. The far-off village green of Bird-in-Eye was not more full of spells than the new-sown acres by Forges Wood. By his toil, and because he toiled as a man, from the spark of imagination within him, and not as a beast from the grind of circumstances without, he had brought the distant adventure home.
In February Tom’s letters became more rousing. The 18th Sussex took part in the big advance on the Ancre, and though Tom himself did not do anything very exciting, he was no longer in the humiliating position of having never seen a German. His descriptions of battle were rather fumbling—“Then we had some tea and a chap got in from the Glosters who had his tunick torn something terrible.”—“We come into a French village full of apple-trees and the walls were down so as you saw into the houses, and in one house there was a pot of ferns on the table.” He also confessed, in reply to a message from Zacky, that though he had seen several Germans, “with faces like roots,” he had not, to his knowledge, killed one.
Mus’ Beatup thought it necessary to improve on his son’s letters at the pub.
“Tom’s having valiant times,” he would say to the bar of the Rifle Volunteer or of the Crown at Woods Corner. “He killed a German officer wud his bayunite and took his machine-gun. Mus’ Archie Lamb is unaccountable proud of him, and says he’s sure to be a lieutenant of the Sussex before long. He’s a good lad is my lad, and it’s a tedious shaum as he was tuk away from his praaper personal wark and maade a soldier of. There’s none of my folk bin soldiers up till now—it’s yeomen we’re born and we doan’t taake wages.... When’s he think the war ull stop?—Well, it might be any time, if the Govunmunt doan’t starve us all fust.”
Sometimes Thyrza Honey brought Tom’s letters up to read to the family at Worge. She was rather shy of her future relations-in-law, who made no special effort to be agreeable to her. Mrs. Beatup persisted in looking on her as a designing woman who had forcibly captured the innocent Tom, Nell was too clever for her, and the males were grumpy and sidling. Only Ivy seemed to like her, but Ivy was on bad terms with her family at present, as ever since young Kadwell on leave had forsaken his sweetheart of the Foul Mile for her robuster charms, and the deserted one had turned up in rage and dishevelment to make a personal protest at Worge, the Beatups had chosen to resent her “goings on.” They also threw Jerry Sumption in her teeth and vaguely accused her of “things.” Now no young man ever came to Worge without her parents lamenting that they had a light daughter, and rows were frequent and undignified. So Ivy’s liking was no recommendation of Thyrza, who in consequence was suspected of goings on herself. However, she would not give up her visits, for she knew Tom liked her to pay them, and often—rather tactlessly—sent messages to his family through her.
Thyrza knew more about the British front and the Battle of the Ancre than did the Beatups. Not that Tom could be eloquent even to her, but her imagination, warmed by love, was quicker to piece together the fragments and fill in the gaps. Also he told her things that he would not have told the others. It was she who heard the details of the great occasion on which he first actually and personally killed a German.
“I was sentry, and you always feel as the place is full of Boshes, and you think you see them and it isn’t them. Then one night after moon-up I thought I saw a Bosh over against the enemy wire, and I said to myself as he wasn’t a Bosh really, though my hair was all standing up on my head. Then he moved and I let fly with my rifle as I’ve done umpty times at nothing, and then he was still and I saw him hanging on the wire. Reckon he was dead, but I went on putting round after round into him I felt so queer—not scared only kind of enjoying it like as if you were shooting at the Fair, only I knew as I was killing something and it made me happy. But afterwards I got very cold and sick.”
“He never tells us how he feels about things,” complained Mrs. Beatup. “It’s never more’n ‘I had my dinner’ to us.”
“Reckon he doan’t git much time for writing letters. He knows as wot he tells me gits passed on to you.”
“Well, I’ll never say naun agaunst you, Thyrza Honey, but I must point out as he knew us afore he knew you. He’s unaccountable young to be shut of his mother, and it ud be praaperer if his messages wur to you through us.”
Mrs. Beatup’s voice was hoarse with dignity, and Thyrza hung her head.
“I’m the last as ud ever want to taake him away from his mother,” she murmured—and ten days later Mrs. Beatup got a thick smudgy letter on which Tom had spent hours of ink and sweat in obedience to Thyrza’s command.
About a fortnight later an impudent-looking little girl with a big mouth came wobbling up Worge drive on a bicycle, and from a wallet extracted a telegram which she handed to Zacky, who sat on the doorstep peeling a stick. Zacky ran with it to his mother, who refused to open it.
“I’ll have no truck with telegrams—they’re bad things. Fetch your faather.”
Zacky ran off in great excitement, and soon Mus’ Beatup came lumbering in, very red after planting potatoes.
“Wot’s all this, mother?—another of those hemmed telegrams?”
“Yes, and I reckon Tom’s killed this time.”
“Can’t be—we only got a letter last night.”
“Ivy says they taake four days to come over. He may have bin killed this mornun—got a shell in his stomach lik Viner’s poor young boy.”
“Maybe it’s to say he’s coming hoame,” said Zacky.
“Shurrup!” growled his father.
He tore the envelope, with a queer twitching of the corners of his mouth.
“He aun’t killed,” he said shakily—“only wounded.”
A moan came from the mother’s parted lips, and she closed her eyes.
“Maybe it’s naun very tar’ble,” continued the father. “They said ‘serious’ in Mus’ Viner’s telegram; here it’s only—‘regret to inform you that Private Beatup has been wounded in action.’”
“Will they let me go to him?”
“Aun’t likely—he’s over in France.”
Mrs. Beatup did not cry, but all the colour went from her face and her lips were strangely blue. Then suddenly her head fell over the back of the chair.
“Zacky!” shouted Mus’ Beatup—“fetch the whisky bottle that’s in the pocket of my oald coat behind the door.”
He put his arm round his wife, and lifted her head to his shoulder, while Zacky ran off with piercing howls. These were fortunately louder than those of the poor duck whose neck Ivy was wringing outside the stable. She rushed in, all bloody from her victim, and in a few moments had laid her mother on the floor, unfastened her dingy remains of stays, and dabbled her forehead with water, while Mus’ Beatup, relieved of his stewardship, stumped about, groaning, and drank the whisky himself. In the midst of it all the big-mouthed little girl, forgotten in the drive, started beating on the door and demanding “if there was an answer, please.” Zacky was sent to dismiss her and vented his grief on the messenger of woe by putting out his tongue at her till she was out of sight—a salute which she returned with all the increased opportunities that nature had given her.
Mrs. Beatup soon recovered.
“I caum over all swummy like ... this is the first time I’ve swounded since Zacky wur born ... I reckon this is sharper than childbirth.”
The tears came at last, and she sobbed against Ivy’s bosom.
“Doan’t go vrothering, mother. I tell you it’s naun tar’ble. They said ‘seriously’ when poor Sid Viner wur wounded to death, and Ted Podgam in Gallipoli. Maybe they’ll send him hoame soon.”
“I want to go to him.... He’s got a hole in him.... Why do they kip his mother from him when he’s sick? When he had measles he never let go my hand one whole day, and he said, ‘Stay wud me, mother—I feel tedious bad.’ Maybe he’s saying it now.”
“And maybe he aun’t. Maybe he’s setting up in bed eating chicken and drinking wine, wud no more’n a piece off his big toe.”
She took out a dirty handkerchief and wiped her mother’s eyes. Then she said:
“I maun go and tell Thyrza Honey.”
But the fates had decided to honour Tom’s mother above his sweetheart in that it was she alone who bore the full grief of his wounding. On her way to the shop, Ivy met Thyrza engaged in something as near a run as her plump person was capable of, and waving in her hand a letter. It was a pencil-scrawl written in hospital at Boulogne, telling Thyrza not to vrother, because he was doing valiant. He had got a Blighty one and hoped to be sent home soon. It was nothing serious, only a bit of shrap in his foot. “Didn’t I tell mother as it was no more’n a piece off his big toe?” cried Ivy triumphantly.
The letter had been Thyrza’s first news of Tom’s wound, and all the anxiety and yearning she felt were swallowed up in the joy of his coming home. A few days later she had a telegram from him, telling of his arrival in hospital at Eastbourne, and by this time Mrs. Beatup had recovered sufficiently to resent the fact that it had been sent to Thyrza and not to her.
Everyone was glad that Tom was at Eastbourne, as it could be reached from Sunday Street in a few hours by carrier’s cart and train. The very next morning Mrs. Beatup and Mrs. Honey set out together, the latter with a basket of eggs and flowers, and her pockets bulging with Player’s cigarettes, the former nursing a weighty dough-cake, beloved of Tom in ancient times, and so baked that she fondly hoped he would never notice the nearly total absence of sugar and plums. Thyrza looked very unlike herself in a close-fitting blue jersey and knitted cap; Mrs. Beatup wore what she called her Sunday cape, which is to say the cape she would have worn on Sundays if she had ever had the leisure to go out, likewise her Sunday bonnet (similarly conditioned), made of black straw and bearing a good crop of wheat.
The two women went by carrier’s cart to Hailsham, where they took the train, arriving at Eastbourne soon after one. They went first to a creamery, where they rather hesitatingly ordered poached eggs and a pot of tea. The eggs were stale and the tea had not that “body” which their custom required. Mrs. Beatup began to wonder what Tom was getting to eat—if this was what you got when you paid for it, what did you get when you didn’t pay for it? she’d like to know.
She was a little relieved at the sight of Tom, looking much fatter and browner and better in hospital than she had ever seen him outside it. He looked happy, too, with his broad face all grins to see them, his mother and sweetheart. And since he looked so brown and well and happy, she wondered why it was that she wanted so much to cry.
Thyrza did not want to cry. She held Tom’s hand, and laughed, and was quite talkative, for her. She made him tell her over and over again how he had been wounded, and how they had taken him to the base hospital and then to Boulogne, and then in a hospital ship all signed with the cross to Blighty. Mrs. Beatup made up her mind that next time she would come alone.
And so she did—much to the surprise of her family, who had hitherto found her full of qualms and fears even at the thought of a visit to Senlac.
“I mun have my boy to myself whiles I’ve got the chance,” she said.
“Well,” remarked Ivy tactlessly, “I reckon he’d sooner have you separate—he’ll be wanting Thyrza aloan a bit.”
“Will he, miss? That aun’t why I’m going different days. We aun’t all lik you wud your kissings and loverings. I wish to goodness you’d git married and have done.”
“And taake some poor boy away from his mother,” mocked Ivy. “I wouldn’t be so cruel.”
Her mother made a swoop at her with her open hand, but Ivy dodged, and ran off, laughing good-naturedly.
None of the other Beatups ever went to see Tom at Eastbourne. The journey was too expensive, and they were sure to have him home on leave before long. Mrs. Beatup went about twice a week, with various messages from the rest of the family muddled up in her head. She would sit beside him, holding his hand, strangely delicate with sickness, between her own hard, cracked, work-weary ones, wishing that they could find more to say to each other, and at the same time cherishing those numbered moments when she could have him to herself. Thyrza went oftener, shutting up shop with a recklessness that would have ruined a less personal business. Tom’s only other visitor was the Reverend Mr. Sumption.
He came one afternoon to inquire about Jerry, but Tom could not tell him much. Jerry kept away from him, and the little that Beatup knew of his doings he was anxious to conceal from his father.
“Maybe now he’s out there he’ll get on better,” he suggested.
“Better? He’s always done well,” said Mr. Sumption loftily. “He’ll have to do unaccountable well if he does better. Don’t think, Tom, that I came to you because I doubted my son, but he was never much of a letter-writer, and now, being busy and all....”
That night Tom lay awake an hour or so, thinking of parents. It was queer how they stuck to their children. His mother, now, coming all this way to see him, though she was nervous of the journey and had very little money to spend on it.... Mr. Sumption, too, standing up for that lousy tyke of a Jerry.... Would he ever feel like this for one of his own flesh—not only when that one lay helpless and dependent on him, but had gone out from him and chosen his own path? “Even as a father pitieth his children ...” so the Bible said, and seemingly there was no bound or end to that pity. Perhaps one day he would feel it in his own heart (the curve of Thyrza’s arms made him think of a cradle). He remembered what Mr. Sumption had said to him long ago, the night before he joined up—“You’ll understand a bit of what I feel ... some day when you’re the father of a son.”
Perhaps it was the inactivity of the days that made Tom lie awake so much at night. He generally had an hour or two to wait for sleep, and it seemed as if in those hours his thoughts jumped and raced in a way they never did by daylight. It was in those hours that he formed his resolution to marry Thyrza before he went back to France. When he left hospital he would probably have a fortnight or so at home, and they could be married at once by licence. Then, he felt, with a sudden swallowing in his throat, he would have had his little bit of life, even if Fritz cut it short before he could see those arms he loved become the cradle he had dreamed them.
The future meant even less to him now than the past. An almighty present ruled the world in those days, for it was all that a man could call his own. Lord! if that crump had dropped a few yards nearer, he might have lost the chances he was grabbing now. He wondered how a year ago he could ever have dreamed and dawdled over his love for Thyrza, put off its declaration to a vague and distant time which might never be. It was queer how he had counted on the future then, made plans for doing things “sometime.” The last year had taught him how close that sometime stood to Never. Not that Tom felt any forebodings. Indeed, he had the optimistic fatalism of most soldiers. He was safe until a shell came along with his number on, and then—well, many better chaps’ numbers had been up before his. Meantime, it was his business to seize the present hour and all it contained, nor, when he planted, think of gathering, nor in the seed-time dream of harvest.
He never doubted Thyrza’s readiness, and was a little surprised when she mentioned things like “gitting some cloathes,” and “having the house done.” Experience had not yet taught her to mistrust the future—for her to-morrow always came, and must be decently prepared for. However, when she saw how desperately Tom was set on marriage, she brushed aside the scruples of habit with a heroism they both of them failed to see.
“I’ll marry you soon as you come hoame, dear, and then we can have a bit of honeymoon.”
“We’ll go away. I’ll take you to Hastings, maybe—we’ll git a room there.”
“Oh, Tom! Lik a grand couple! We mun’t go chucking the money away.”
“We woan’t chuck it all away, but we’ll chuck a fair-sized bit. I doan’t git much chance of spending out there.”
She looked at him tenderly.
“To think as I ever thought you wur slower nor me!”
“I wur a gurt owl,” said Tom. “Lord! if I’d a-gone West, and never so much as kissed you....”
“But you did kiss me, dear—in the shop, the evenun afore you went away.”
“Twur only your hand, and I wur all quaaking like a calf.”
Thyrza sighed.
“It wur a lovely kiss.”
The Beatups were naturally indignant at Tom’s decision. To them it savoured of undue haste, if not of indecency. Courtships in Sunday Street usually lasted from two to ten years. Indeed, Maudie Speldrum had been wooed for fifteen years before she took matters into her own hands and proposed to Bert Pix. Tom had not been engaged to Thyrza six months. What did they want to get married for? And what was Tom but a lad?—a mere child in his mother’s eyes—a calf that Mrs. Honey was leading to market, all ignorant (as she could not be) of what lay ahead. In Sunday Street, marriage was the end—the end of love, the end of youth—and mixed with Mrs. Beatup’s jealousy of the other woman and suspicion of her motives, was the desire to keep her son a little longer in the frisky meadows of his boyhood before he was led to those lean pastures she knew so well.
About the middle of March, Tom was moved to a convalescent hospital at Polegate, and a fortnight later sent home. Worge gave him a big hail, and the whole family, including Thyrza, sat down to a supper which was supposed to outshine the best efforts of hospital. That supper was not only a welcome but a farewell. When he had eaten two more in the muddle of his kin, he would eat a third in quiet, alone with Thyrza. The few necessary preparations for his marriage had been made, and the room was booked in Hastings for the third day from now. His happiness made him dreamy, and also tender towards those he was to leave, for though he had not realised his mother’s jealousy of his sweetheart, he vaguely understood that it would hurt her to lose him, as lose him she must when he went to this other woman’s arms. So he held her hand under the table oftener and longer than he held Thyrza’s, and kissed her good night without being asked.
The next day Harry took him to see the spring sowings. They were finished now, and the chocolate acres lay moist and furrowed in a muffle of misty April sunshine. Harry, more thickset and sinewy than of old, tramped a little behind his brother, as a workman after an inspector, with sidelong glance at Tom’s brown, stubborn profile, anxious to see if praise or delight could be read there.
Tom was indeed delighted with the fruits of Harry’s industry, swelling in soft, scored curves from Worge’s southern boundaries at Forges Wood to the northern limits of the Street. But he was also aghast.
“You’ll never have the labour to kip and reap this—and you’ve bruk up grass!”
“I can manage valiant till harvest, and then I’ll git extra hands. As for the grass, ’twur only an old-fool’s idea that it mun never be ploughed.”
“And I reckon ’tis a young-fool’s idea to plough it,” said Tom rebukingly.
“The newspaaper said as grass-lands mun be bruk up now, to maake more acres.”
“And wot does the paaper know about it?”
“A lot, seemingly.”
“It aun’t lik to know more than men as have worked on the ground all their lives, and their faathers before ’em. Any farmer ull tell you as it’s hemmed risky to plough grass.”
“The paaper never said as it wurn’t risky, but it said as farmers must taake some risks these times, and git good crops fur the country, and help on the War.”
“Doan’t you go vrothering about the War, youngster. It aun’t no concern of yourn—and I reckon it woan’t help us Sussex boys much if our farms go to the auctioneer’s while we’re away.”
“Worge woan’t go to the auctioneer’s. You spik lik faather wud his faint heart. And a lot of good it’ll do if you chaps beat the Germans out there and we have to maake peace ’cos we’re starving wud hunger at home.”
“There’ll be no starving—you taake it from me. We’ll have ’em across the Rhine in another six months, so ’kip the home-fires burning till the lads’ returning,’ and doan’t go mucking up the farm fur the saake of a lot of silly stuff you read in the paapers.”
But Harry stuck doggedly to his idea—
“I mun try, Tom—and I’ll never git the plaace sold up, fur we’re spending naun extra save fur the seed and a bit of manure. I go unaccountable wary, and do most of the wark myself, wud faather to help me on his good days, and Juglery and Elphick stuck on jobs as they can’t do no harm at. It’ll do Worge naun but good in the end—wheat’s at eighty shilling a quarter, and guaranteed—and anyhow, I tell you, I mun try.”
Tom was impressed.
“Well, Harry, I woan’t say you aun’t a good lad. But it maakes me unaccountable narvous. Here have I bin toiling and sweating this five year jest to kip the farm together, and now you go busting out all round and saying it ull win the War. Wot if we chaps out there doan’t win, t’aun’t likely as you will. Howsumdever....”
Tom’s marriage was on the Thursday of Easter week. All the morning a soft teeming fog lay over the fields, drawing out scents of growth and warmth and life. Worge lay in the midst of it like the ghost of a farm, a dim grey shadow on the whiteness, and the voices of her men came muffled, as in dreams. Towards noon the sunshine had begun to eat away the mist—it grew yellower, streakier, and at last began to scatter, rolling up the fields in solemn clouds, balling and pilling itself against the hedges, melting into the April green of the woods; and then suddenly it was gone—sucked up into the sky, sucked down into the earth, living only in a few drops in the cups of violets.
The Bethel stared away across the fields to Puddledock. For some time its roof, with the chipped Georgian pediment, had risen above the mist. Then the grim windows had come out to stare, and then the tombstones that grew round its feet, leaning and tottering among the chapel weed.
Tom and Thyrza were to be married at the Bethel. This had caused some surprise in the neighbourhood, as the Beatups had always been “Church”; but friendship and convenience had led to the decision—friendship for the Reverend Mr. Sumption, because Tom knew him better than Mr. Poullett-Smith, and was sorry for him on account of Jerry, convenience because the chapel was close at hand, and the makers of the wedding breakfast would have time to run across and witness the ceremony, which they could not have done had it taken place at Brownbread Street, two miles away.
The only one to whom these reasons seemed inadequate was Nell. To her the proceeding was not only heretical but mean—her affection for the Church had always been led by taste rather than belief, and her attitude, which she had considered (under instruction) as that of an orthodox Anglican, was in reality that of an Italian peasant, who looks upon his church as his drawing-room, a place of brightness to which he can go for refuge from the drabness of every day. Her opposition to the chapel marriage was based on an emotion similar to what she would have felt for the party who, with the chance of eating and drinking out of delicate china in the drawing-room, chose to devour their food out of broken pots in the scullery. She did not acknowledge this, any more than she acknowledged the motive which fed uneasily on Mr. Poullett-Smith’s inevitable disgust; she talked to Tom about his duty as a Baptized Churchman, and was both surprised and grieved to find that the War seemed to have destroyed what little sense of this he had ever had.
“I tell you as it’s all different out there. There aun’t no church and chapel saum as there is here. You stick to church on Church Parade down at the base, but when you’re up in the firing line, there’s a queer kind of religion going around. You hear chaps praying as if they wur swearing and swearing as if they wur praying, and in the Y.M. plaace they have sort of holy sing-songs wud priests and ministers all mixed up; and I’ve heard a Catholic priest read the English funeral over one of us, and I’ve seen a rosary on a dead Baptist’s neck. Church and chapel may be all very good for civvies, but you can’t go vrothering about such things when you’re a soldier.”
Nell was hurt and frightened by these sayings. She had an idea that any danger or suffering would only make a man cling closer to the Sanctuary. It was terrible to think that at the first earthquake Peter’s Rock cracked to its foundations. A defiant loyalty inspired her, and at first she made up her mind not to go to the wedding, but she could not resist the temptation of asking Mr. Poullett-Smith’s advice, and he thought she had better attend, and pray for the backsliders. He also earnestly bade her distrust any appearance of cracks in Peter’s Rock, and she went away comforted, with shining eyes and burning cheeks, and her church standing firmer than ever on the rock which was neither Peter nor Christ, but her love for a very ordinary young man.
So all the Beatups went to the Bethel, leaving Worge locked up and the yard in charge of Elphick. Mrs. Beatup wore her Sunday bonnet, the wheat-crop having been superseded, contrary to all the laws of rotation, by one of small green grapes. Both Ivy and Nell had new gowns, Ivy looking squeezed and unnatural in a sky-blue cloth, which together with a pair of straight-fronted corsets, she had bought at a Hastings dress agency—Nell pretty and demure in a grey coat and skirt, and one of those small towny-looking hats which seemed to find their way to her head alone in all Dallington. Mus’ Beatup, with Harry and Zacky, smelled strongly of hair-oil and moth-killer, and Harry had nearly scrubbed his skin off in his efforts to get out of it the earth of his new furrows. He was considered too young to be Tom’s best man, and the office had been at the last moment unexpectedly filled by Bill Putland. Bill, now a sergeant, was home on seven days’ leave, looking very brown and smart, and Polly Sinden, who, not having been invited with her parents to the breakfast, had vowed she would waste no time going to the chapel, suddenly changed her mind and appeared in her most ceremonial hat.
The chapel was packed with Sindens, Bourners, Putlands, Hubbles, Viners, Kadwells, Pixes. Mrs. Lamb of Bucksteep was there, with Miss Marian, but as she had not thought it necessary to put on the elegant clothes in which she was seen gliding into church on Sundays, her presence was regarded as an affront rather than an honour; Mrs. Beatup would have dressed herself in her best for any Bucksteep wedding, and thought that the squire’s wife might have done the same for her. Also, she came in very late, and her entrance was mistaken for that of the bride by many folk, who shot up out of the pew-boxes, only to be disappointed by the sight of Mrs. Lamb’s faded, powdered features behind a spotted veil, and Miss Marian swinging along after her with a tread like a policeman. “I reckon my feet are smaller than hers,” thought Nell, “for all that I’m only a farmer’s daughter.”
Then Mr. Sumption came out of the vestry, and stood under the pulpit to wait for the bride. He looked more like a figure of cursing than of blessing—black as a rook, with his thick curly hair falling into his eyes, yet not quite hiding the furrows which the plough of care had dragged across his forehead. There was a rustle and a flutter and a turning of heads, as Thyrza came up the aisle on the arm of the bachelor cousin who was giving her away. She wore a grey gown like a March cloud, and carried a bunch of flowers, and the congregation whispered when they saw that she had sleeked her feathery hair with water, so that it lay smooth behind her ears, which were round and pink like those of mice. “It didn’t look like Thyrza,” everyone said—and perhaps that was why Tom was so loutishly nervous, and nearly broke Bill Putland’s heart with his fumblings and stutterings.
Thyrza was nervous too, her head drooped like an over-blown rose upon its stalk, and Mr. Sumption’s manner was not of the kind that soothes and reassures. He shouted at the bride and bridegroom, and “thumped at” various members of the congregation who whispered or (later in the proceedings) yawned. He was not often asked to officiate at weddings, and had apparently decided to make the most of this one, for he wound up with an address to the married pair so lengthy and apocalyptic that Mrs. Beatup became anxious as to the fate of a pudding she had left to “cook itself,” and rising noisily in her pew creaked out through a silence weighted with doom. “And whosoever hath not a wedding garment,” the minister shouted after her, “shall be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”—for which Mrs. Beatup never forgave him, as she had spent nearly three shillings on retrimming her bonnet, “and if her cape wurn’t good enough fur him, she reckoned he’d never seen a better on the gipsy-woman’s back.”
The service came to an end at last, and the congregation pushed after the bride to see her get into the cab drawn by a pair of seedy greys, which would take her the few yards from the chapel to the farm. The breakfast was to be at Worge, for Thyrza had no kin besides the bachelor cousin, and it was considered more fitting that her husband’s family should undertake the social and domestic duties of the occasion. The feast was spread in the kitchen, which had been decorated with flags, lent for the afternoon from the club-room of the Rifle Volunteer. The unsugared wedding-cake was a terrible humiliation to Mrs. Beatup, who felt sure that, in spite of her repeated explanations, everyone would put it down to poverty and meanness instead of to the tyranny of “Govunmunt.” However, she had restored the balance of her self-respect by providing wine (at eighteen-pence the bottle).
There was much laughter and good-humour and the wit proper to weddings as the guests squeezed themselves round the table. Even Mr. Sumption’s five-minute grace, in which he approvingly mentioned more than one dish on the table, but added to his score with Mrs. Beatup by referring to the wine as poison and “the forerunner of thirst in hell,” was only a temporary blight. The bride and bridegroom alone looked subdued, their sleek heads drooping together, their hands nervously crumbling their food—also Ivy, who was heard to say in a hoarse whisper to Nell, “If I can’t go somewheres and taake my stays off I shall bust.” However, in time she forgot her constriction in flirting with Thyrza’s bachelor cousin, who had pale blue eyes, bulging out as if in vain effort to catch sight of a receding chin, and was exempt by reason of ruptured hernia from military service.
The usual healths were drunk, and the sight of other people drinking—for he himself would take only water—seemed to intoxicate Mr. Sumption, and he forgot the cares that had made his black hair as ashes on his head—his sleepless anxiety for Jerry, and the crying in him of that day which shall burn the stubble—and became merry as a corn-fed colt, laughing with all his big white teeth, and paying iron-shod compliments to Thyrza and Ivy and Nell, and even Mrs. Beatup, who maintained, however, an impressive indifference. Bill Putland made the principal speech of the afternoon, and looked so smart and handsome, with his hair in a soaring quiff and a trench-ring on each hand, that Ivy might have plotted to substitute his arm for Ern Honey’s round her waist, if she had not been too experienced to fail to realise that he was about the only man in Dallington she could not win with her floppy charms.
In the end all was cheerful incoherence, and just as the sunshine was losing its heat on the yard-stones, the bride and bridegroom rose to go away. A trap from the Volunteer would drive them to the station, and they climbed into it through a flying rainbow of confetti, which stuck in Thyrza’s loosening hair, and spotted her dim gown with colours.
Amidst cheering and laughter the old horse lurched off, and soon Thyrza’s grey and Tom’s dun were blurred together in the distance, which was already staining with purple as the air thickened towards the twilight. The guests turned back into the house, or scattered over fields and footpaths. Ivy rushed upstairs to take off her stays, and Bill Putland swaggered home between his parents, with a flower in his button-hole and plans in his heart for an evening at Little Worge. The Reverend Mr. Sumption went off with Bourner to the smithy. The blacksmith had a shoeing and clipping to do, and the minister would sit and watch him in the red, hoof-smelling warmth, and lend an experienced hand if occasion needed. Mus’ Beatup, his tongue all sour with the Australian wine, took advantage of the general flit to creep along the hedge to the Rifle Volunteer, there to wait for the magic stroke of six and unlocking of his paradise. Mrs. Beatup was the last to leave the doorstep. She thought she could hear the old horse clopping on the East Road, and when her eyes no longer helped her to follow her son, she used her ears. She remembered that earlier occasion when she had gone with him to the end of the drive and kissed him there. He had wanted her then; he did not want her now—his good-bye kiss had been kind yet perfunctory. Another woman had him—a woman who had never suffered pain or discomfort or anxiety or privation for his sake. Yet her jealousy had unexpectedly died. Somehow, to-day, all that she had suffered for Tom when she bore him, nursed him, reared him and bred him, seemed a sufficient reward in itself. Her sufferings had made him what he was, and this other woman took only what she, his mother, had made. “She never went heavy wud him, nor bore him in pain, nor lay awaake at night wud his screeching, nor thought as he’d die when he cut his teeth, nor went all skeered when he took the fever.... So thur aun’t no sense in vrothering. Reckon he’ll always be more mine nor hers, even if I am never to set eyes on him agaun.”
Tom and Thyrza came back from Hastings in a few days. They talked as if they had been away for weeks, and indeed it had seemed weeks to them—not that any moment had faltered or dragged, but each had held the delight of hours, and each hour had been a day of new wonder. Perhaps the dazzle was brightest for Tom—Thyrza could remember an earlier honeymoon, which had held no presage of darkness to follow, and she slipped back pretty easily into the old habit of having a man about her; but for Tom even the traces of her here and there in the room, her hat thrown down, her petticoat trailing over a chair, the dim scent of clover that hung on her pillow, making her bed like a field, all joined to bind him with her enchantment, to drug him with an ecstasy which had its sweet foundation in the commonplace.
When they came back to Sunday Street the honeymoon did not end. Contrariwise, it seemed to wax fuller in the freedom of the old ways. Even sweeter than the sense of passionate holiday was the taking up of a common life together, the daily sharing of food and work and rest, the doing of things he had done a hundred times before, but never like this. Thyrza’s little cottage had been hung with new curtains, and some unknown hand—which afterwards unexpectedly proved to be Nell’s—had filled it with flowers on the evening of their return. Bunches of primroses, violets and bluebells stuffed the vases in bedroom and parlour, and the soft fugitive scent of April banks mixed with the scent of lath and plaster which haunts old cottages, and the more spicy, powdery smells of the shop.
The days were warm and drowsy, and the fields lay in a muffle of sunshine, their distances all blurred with heat. Round every farm the orchards rolled in pink-stained clouds of bloom, and the young wheat was green as a rainy sunset. The wind that brought the mutter of the guns, brought also the bleating of lambs from the pastures; scents seemed to hang and brood on the air, or drift slowly from the woods—scents of standing water and budding thorn, of hazel leaves hot in the sun, and soft mixed fragrances of gorse and fern, of cows, of baking earth, of currant bushes in cottage gardens....
Towards evening Tom and Thyrza usually closed the shop, and came out—either for a stroll up to Worge to see his family, or for some more adventurous excursion to Brownbread Street, or Furnacefield, or up to the North Road and the straggle of old Dallington. They had one or two quite long walks, for a new enterprise had kindled in them both, and for the first time there was mystery and allure in some shaky signpost at the throws, or a little lane creeping off secretly. One day they walked as far as Brightling, past the obelisk, through the shuttling dimness of Pipers Wood and up Twelve Oaks Hill by strange farms to the sudden clump of Brightling among the trees. They went into the churchyard where the yews spread shadows nearly as dark as their own blackness and strange white peacocks perched on the tombstones, with shrill, unnatural cries. There was also a huge cone-shaped object, built of damp stones and thickly grown with moss, and Thyrza unaccountably took fright at this, and the peacocks, and the shadows and the trees, and walked for most of the way home with her head under Tom’s coat.
He did not often think of when this time should end, of the day that crept nearer and nearer to him over drowsing twilights and magical, green sunrises. He knew that a month hence all this delight would be a memory, that between him and the spurge-thickening fields of May would lie all the life of ugly adventure into which fate had pitched him—and Thyrza would come to him only on scraps of paper, in puffs of scent, in fugitive dreams, in a passing light in some other girl’s eyes.... But he was too simple and too happy to let thoughts of the future spoil the present, besides, his habit of disregarding the future now stood his friend. He would not see the clover in bloom, but saw it in the green—deep, rippling, gleaming, like the sea—he would miss the hay, but now he could see the buttercups under the moon, so yellow that they seemed to paint the sky and turn the moon to honey; Thyrza might in a month’s time be a memory, belong to phantasy, but now she was a woman solid and close, his woman, the maker of his home, the maker of himself anew.... Once his mother had borne him, and now it seemed as if this woman had borne him again, into a new experience, a new happiness, a new wonder—so perfect and complete that sometimes he almost felt as if it did not matter whether he held it for ever or for a day.
On his last evening, he went up to Worge to say good-bye. He felt already as if he did not belong to the place. Harry’s drastic dealings with the tilth seemed to have taken the fields away from him—he no longer felt even a distant guardianship of those brown-ribbed acres which had been green when he worked on them. He felt, too, with a sense of estrangement, the dirt and litter of the house, the muddling business which at six o’clock had Ivy swilling out the scullery and Mrs. Beatup still struggling with the washing. Thyrza never did a stroke of housework after dinner, and yet her morning’s tasks were never hurried; she never had Ivy’s flushed, red face and tousled hair, or Mrs. Beatup’s forehead shiny with sweat.
His family were conscious of this—conscious that he now had a standard of comparison by which to measure their short-comings, and it made them sulkily suspicious in their attitude. He was already the alien—the bird that has left the nest, the puppy that has grown up and gone a-hunting on his own. But this sense of estrangement only seemed to make his parting sadder, for he vaguely felt as if he had left them before he need, had already divided himself from them by an earlier good-bye, of which this was only the echo and the ghost.
Mrs. Beatup enquired politely after Thyrza, and sent Ivy out to fetch in the others. Zacky climbed on Tom’s knee and asked him to send him home a German helmet, and Harry—whose heart was really very warm and loving towards Tom—stood shyly behind his chair and could not speak a word. Mus’ Beatup gave Tom an account of the Battle of the Ancre, but failed to create the usual respectful impression.
“You see, faather, I was out there, and I know that it happened different. St. Quentin aun’t anywhere near the Rhine.”
“There’s more’n one St. Quentin, saum as there’s more’n one Mockbeggar, and more’n one Iden Green. How do you know as there’s no St. Quentin on the Rhine? You’ve never bin there, and you’ll never be there, nuther.”
“I reckon I’ll be there before I’m many months older.”
“You woan’t,” said Mus’ Beatup solemnly, “it’s more likely as the Germans ull be crossing the River Cuckmere than as you’ll ever be crossing the River Rhine. Now, be quiet, Nell, and a-done do, fur I tell you it’s bin proved as we’ll never git to the River Rhine, so where’s the sense of going on wud the war, I’d like to know?”
“To prevent the Germans crossing the River Cuckmere,” snapped Nell.
“Oh, doan’t go talking such tar’ble stuff,” moaned Mrs. Beatup. “If the Germans caum here I’d die of fits.”
“They woan’t come here,” said her husband, “and we’ll never git there, so wot’s the sense of all this vrother, and giving up our lads and ploughing up our grass and going short of beer, all to end where we started? If this war had bin a-going to do us any good, it ud a-done it before now, surelye; but it’s a lousy, tedious, lamentaable war, and the sooner we git shut of it the better.”
“Well, I must be going,” said Tom, standing up. He felt rather angry with his father, who, he thought, talked like a “conscientious objector,” and was prostrating his mighty intellect to base uses. “But maybe the beer has addled him—he’s had a regular souse this winter, by his looks.”
He said good-bye to the family, refusing his mother’s invitation to stay to supper, as he had promised to take Thyrza for a walk that evening. However, he asked her to come with him to the door, as there was something he wanted to say to her alone.
Mrs. Beatup felt pleased at this mark of confidence, but all Tom had to say as he kissed her on the threshold was—
“Mother, if anything wur to happen to me ... out there, you know ... you’d be good to Thyrza?”
“Oh, Tom—you aun’t expecting aught?”
“I hope not, surelye—but how am I to know?”
Her face wrinkled for crying.
“You didn’t use to spik lik that....”
“Come, mother—be sensible. There aun’t no sense spikking different, things being wot they are. I dudn’t use to be married ... it’s being married that maakes a chap think of wot might happen.”
“You’d want me to taake Thyrza to live here?...”
“Reckon I wouldn’t. She’ll have her liddle bit of money, thank God, and maybe a pension besides. It aun’t money as I’m thinking of—it’s just—it’s just as she’ll break her heart.”
“And I’ll break mine, too, I reckon.”
Tom groaned.
“You’re a valiant help to me, mother. I ask you a thing to maake me a bit easier, and all you do is to vrother me the more.”
“Doan’t you go abusing your mother, Tom—wud your last breath. If Thyrza’s heart gits broke I’ll give her a bit of mine to mend it with—but no good ever caum of talking of such things.”
“I woan’t talk of them no more. Only, it had to be done—you see, mother, there might be a little ’un as well as Thyrza....”
“Oh, Tom, a liddle baby fur you!”
He blushed—“There aun’t no knowing, and I’d be easier if....”
“Oh, but I’d justabout love a liddle grandchild. You need never fret over that, Tom. I’d give my days to a liddle young un of yourn.”
He kissed her, and they parted in love.