Harvest

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

III

"A jolly view!"

Janet assented. She was sitting behind the pony, while Rachel had walked up the hill beside the carriage, to the high point where both she and the pony—a lethargic specimen of the race—had paused to take breath.

They were on a ridge whence there was a broad bit of the world to see. To the north, a plain rich in all the diversities of English land—field and wood, hamlet and church, the rising grounds and shallow depressions, the small enclosures and the hedgerow timber, that make all the difference between the English midlands and, say, the plain of Champagne, or a Russian steppe. Across the wide, many-coloured scene, great clouds from the west were sweeping, with fringes of rain and sudden bursts of light or shadow, which in their perpetual movement—suggesting attack from the sky and response from the earth—gave drama and symbol to the landscape.

On the south—things very different! First, an interlocked range of hills, forest-clothed, stretching east and west, and, at the very feet of the two women, a forest valley offering much that was strange to English eyes. Two years before it had been known only to the gamekeeper and the shooting guests of a neighbouring landowner. Now a great timber camp filled it. The gully ran far and deep into the heart of the forest country, with a light railway winding along the bottom, towards an unseen road. The steep sides of the valley—Rachel and Janet stood on the edge of one of them—were covered with felled trees, cut the preceding winter, and left as they fell. The dead branch and leaf of the trees had turned to a rich purple, and dyed all the inside of the long deep cup. But along its edges stretched the forest, still untouched, and everywhere, in the bare spaces left here and there by the felling among the "rubble and woody wreck," green and gold mosses and delicate grasses had sprung up, a brilliant enamel, inlaid with a multitude of wild flowers.

"Look!" cried Rachel.

For suddenly, down below them, a huge trunk began to move as though of its own accord. Hissing and crashing like some gray serpent, it glided down the hill-side, till it approached a group of figures and horses congregated at the head of the valley, near an engine puffing smoke. Then something invisible happened, and presently a trolley piled high with logs detached itself from the group, and set out on a solitary journey down the railway, watched here and there by men in queer uniforms with patches on their backs.

"German prisoners!" said Janet, and strained her eyes to see, thinking all the time of a letter she had received that morning from her soldier brother fighting with the English troops to the west of Rheims:—

"The beggars are on the run! Foch has got them this time. But, oh, Lord, the sight they've made of all this beautiful country! Trampled, and ruined, and smashed! all of it. Deliberate loot and malice everywhere, and tales of things done in the villages that make one see red. We captured a letter to his wife on a dead German this morning: 'Well, the offensive is a failure, but we've done one thing—we've smashed up another bit of France!' How are we ever going to live with this people in the same world after the war?"

And there below, in the heart of this remote English woodland, now being sacrificed to the war, moved the sons of this very people, cast up here by the tide of battle. Janet had heard that nobody spoke to them during the work, except to give directions; after work they had their own wired camp, and all intercourse between them and the Canadian woodmen, or the English timber girls, was forbidden. But what were they saying among themselves—what were they thinking—these peasants, some perhaps from the Rhineland, or the beautiful Bavarian country, or the Prussian plains? Janet had travelled a good deal in Germany before the war, using her holidays as a mistress in a secondary school, and her small savings, in a kind of wandering which had been a passion with her. She had known Bavarians and Prussians at home. But here, in this corner of rural England, with this veil of silence drawn between them and the nation which at last, in this summer of 1918, was grimly certain, after four years of vengeance and victory, what ferments were, perhaps, working in the German mind?

Yes, there was the German camp, and beyond it under the hill the Canadian forestry camp; whilst just beneath them could be seen the roof of the large women's hostel.

Another exclamation from Rachel, as, on their left, another great tree started for the bottom of the hollow.

"But haven't you seen all this before?" asked Janet.

"No, I never saw anything of lumbering."

The tone showed the sudden cooling and reserve that were always apparent in Rachel's manner when any subject connected with Canada came into conversation. Yet Janet had noticed with surprise that it was Rachel herself who, when the harvest was nearly over, had revived the subject of the camp, and planned the drive for this Saturday afternoon. It had seemed to Janet once or twice that she was forcing herself to do it, as though braving some nervousness of which she was ashamed.

The rough road on which they were driving wound gradually downward through the felled timber. Soon they could hear the clatter of the engine, and the hissing of the saws which seized the trees on their landing, and cut and stripped them in a trice, ready for loading. Round the engine and at the starting-place of the trolleys was a busy crowd: lean and bronzed Canadians; women in leather breeches and coats, busily measuring and marking; a team of horses showing silvery white against the purple of the hill; and everywhere the German prisoner lads, mostly quite young and of short stature. The pony carriage passed a group of them, and they stared with cheerful, furtive looks at the two women.

Then the group of timber girls below perceived the approaching visitors, and a figure, detaching itself from the rest, came to meet the carriage. A stately woman, black-haired, in coat and breeches like the rest, with a felt hat, and a badge of authority, touches of green besides on the khaki uniform. Janet recognized her at once as Mrs. Fergusson, their comrade for a time at college, and much liked both by her and Rachel.

She came laughing, with hands outstretched.

"Well, here we meet again! Jolly to see you! A new scene, isn't it? Life doesn't stand still nowadays! One of my girls will take the carriage for you."

A stalwart maiden unharnessed the pony and let him graze.

Mrs. Fergusson took possession of her visitors, and walked on beside them, describing the different stages of the work, and sections of the workers.

"You see those tall fellows farthest off? Those work the saws and cut up the trees as they come down. Then the horses bring them to the rollers, and the Canadians guide them with those hooks till the crane seizes hold of them and lifts them on to the trolley. But before the hooks get them—you see the girls there?—they do all the measuring; they note everything in their books and they mark every log. All the payments of the camp, the wages paid, the sums earned by the trolley contractor who takes them to the station, the whole finance in fact, depends on the women. I've trained scores besides and sent them out to other camps! But now come, I must introduce you to the commandant of the camp."

"A Canadian?" asked Janet.

"No, an American! He comes from Maine, but he had been lumbering in Canada, with several mills and, camps under him. So he volunteered a year ago to bring over a large Forestry battalion—mostly the men he had been working with in Quebec. Splendid fellows! But he's the king!"

Then she raised her voice,—

"Captain Ellesborough!"

A young man in uniform, with a slouch hat, came forward, leaping over the logs in his path. He gave a military salute to the two visitors, and a swift scrutinizing look to each of them. Rachel was aware of a thin, handsome face bronzed by exposure, a pair of blue eyes, rather pale in colour, to which the sunburn of brow and cheek gave a singular brilliance, and a well-cut, determined mouth. The shoulders were those of an athlete, but on the whole the figure was lightly and slenderly built, making an impression rather of grace and elasticity than of exceptional strength.

"You would like to see the camp?" he said, looking at Rachel.

"Aren't you too busy to show it?"

"Not at all. I am not wanted just now. Let me help you over those logs."
He held out his hand.

"Oh, thank you, I don't want any help," said Rachel a little scornfully. He smiled in approving silence, and she followed his lead, leaping and scrambling over the piles of wood, with a deer's sureness of foot, till he invited her to stop and watch the timber girls at their measuring. As the two visitors approached, land-women and forest-women eyed each other with friendly looks, but without speech. For talk, indeed, the business in hand was far too strenuous. The logs were coming in fast; there must be no slip in measurement or note. The work was hard, and the women doing it had been at it all day. But on the whole, what a comely and energetic group, with the bright eyes, the clear skins, the animation born of open air and exercise.

"They can't talk to you now!" said Mrs. Fergusson in Janet's ear, amid the din of the engines, "but they'll talk at tea. And there's a dance to-night."

Janet looked round the wild glen in wonder.

"Who come?"

"Oh, there's an Air Force camp half a mile away—an Army Service camp on the other side. The officers come—some of them—every Saturday. We take down the partitions in our huts. You can't think what pretty frocks the girls put on! And we dance till midnight."

"And you've no difficulty with the men working in the camp?"

"You mean—how do they treat the girls?" laughed Mrs. Fergusson. "They're charming to the girls! Chivalrous, kind, everything they should be. But then," she added proudly, "my girls are the pick—educated women all of them. I could trust them anywhere. And Captain Ellesborough—you won't get any mischief going on where he is."

Meanwhile the captain, well out of earshot of Mrs. Fergusson's praise, was explaining the organization of the camp to Rachel as they slowly climbed the hill, on the opposite side from that by which she and Janet had descended.

"Which works hardest, I wonder?" she said at last, as they paused to look down on the scene below. "We on our farm, or you here? I've never had more than five hours' sleep through the harvest? But now things are slacker."

He threw his head back with a laugh.

"Why, this seems to me like playing at lumbering! It's all so tiny—so babyish. Oh, yes, there's plenty of work—for the moment. But it'll be all done, in one more season; not a stick left. England can't grow a real forest."

"Compared to America?"

"Well, I was thinking of Canada. Do you know Canada?"

"A little." Then she added hastily: "But I never saw any lumbering."

"What a pity! It's a gorgeous life. Oh, not for women. These women here—awfully nice girls, and awfully clever too—couldn't make anything of it in Canada. I had a couple of square miles of forest to look after—magnificent stuff!—Douglas fir most of it—and two pulping mills, and about two hundred men—a rough lot."

"But you're not Canadian?"

"Oh, Lord, no! My people live in Maine. I was at Yale. I got trained at the forest school there, and after a bit went over the Canadian frontier with my brother to work a big concession in Quebec. We did very well—made a lot of money. Then came the war. My brother joined up with the Canadian army. I stayed behind to try and settle up the business, till the States went in, too. Then they set me and some other fellows to raise a Forestry battalion—picked men. We went to France first, and last winter I was sent here—to boss this little show! But I shan't stay here long! It isn't good enough. Besides, I want to fight! They've promised me a commission in our own army."

He looked at her with sparkling eyes, and her face involuntarily answered the challenge of his; so much so that his look prolonged itself. She was wonderfully pleasant to look upon, this friend of Mrs. Fergusson's. And she was farming on her own? A jolly plucky thing to do! He decided that he liked her; and his talk flowed on. He was frank about himself, and full of self-confidence; but there was a winning human note in it, and Rachel listened eagerly, talking readily, too, whenever there was an opening. They climbed to the top of the hill where they stood on the northern edge of the forest, looking across the basin and the busy throng below. He pointed out to her a timber-slide to their right, and they watched the trees rushing down it, dragged, as he now saw plainly, by the wire cable which was worked by the engine in the hollow. A group of German prisoners, half-way down, were on the edge of the slide, guiding the logs.

"We don't have any trouble with them," said the captain carelessly. "They're only too thankful to be here. They've two corporals of their own who keep order. Oh, of course we have our eyes open. There are some sly beggars among them. Our men have no truck with them. I shouldn't advise you to employ them. It wouldn't do for women alone."

His smile was friendly, and Rachel found it pleasant to be advised by him. As to employing prisoners, she said, even were it allowed, nothing would induce her to risk it. There were a good many on Colonel Shepherd's estate, and she sometimes met them, bicycling to and from their billets in the village, in the evening after work. "Once or twice they've jeered at me," she said, flushing.

"Jeered at you!" he repeated in surprise.

"At my dress, I mean. It seems to amuse them."

"I see. You wear the land army dress like these girls?"

"When I'm at work."

"Well, I'm glad you don't wear it always," he said candidly. "These girls here look awfully nice of an evening. They always change."

He glanced at her curiously. Her dress of dark blue linen, her pretty hat to match, with its bunch of flowers, not to speak of the slender ankles and feet in their blue stockings and khaki shoes, seemed to him extraordinarily becoming. But she puzzled him. There was something about her quite different from the girls of the hostel. She appeared to be older and riper than they; yet he did not believe she was a day more than five-and-twenty, and some of them were older than that. Unmarried, he supposed. "Miss Henderson?" Yes, he was sure that was the name Mrs. Fergusson had mentioned. His eyes travelled discreetly to her bare, left hand. That settled it.

"Well, if I came across these fellows jeering at an Englishwoman, I'd know the reason why!" he resumed hotly. "You should have complained."

She shook her head, smiling. "One doesn't want to be a nuisance in war time. One can always protect oneself."

He smiled.

"That's what women always say, and—excuse me—they can't!"

She laughed.

"Oh, yes, we can—the modern woman."

"I don't see much difference between the modern woman and the old-fashioned woman," he said obstinately. "It isn't dress or working at munitions that makes the difference."

"No, but—what they signify."

"What?—a freer life, getting your own way, seeing more of the world?"
The tone was a trifle antagonistic.

"Knowing more of the world," she said, quietly. "We're not the ignorant babes our grandmothers were at our age. That's why we can protect ourselves."

And again he was aware of something sharp or bitter in her—some note of disillusionment—that jarred with the soft, rather broad face and dreamy eyes. It stirred him, and they presently found themselves plunged in a free and exciting discussion of the new place and opportunities of women in the world, the man from the more conservative, the women from the more revolutionary point of view. Secretly, he was a good deal repelled by some of his companion's opinions, and her expression of them. She quoted Wells and Shaw, and he hated both. He was an idealist and a romantic, with a volume of poems in his pocket. She, it seemed, was still on a rising wave of rebellion, moral and social, like so many women; while his wave had passed, and he was drifting in the trough of it. He supposed she had dropped religion, like everything else. Well, the type didn't attract him. He believed the world was coming back to the old things. The war had done it—made people think. No doubt this girl had rushed through a lot of things already, and thought she knew everything. But she didn't.

Then, as their talk went on, this first opinion dropped in confusion. For instead of presenting him with a consistent revolutionist, his companion was, it appeared, full of the most unexpected veins and pockets of something much softer and more appealing. She had astonishing returns upon herself; and after some sentiment that had seemed to him silly or even outrageous, a hurried "Oh, I dare say that's all nonsense!" would suddenly bewilder or appease a marked trenchancy of judgment in himself which was not accustomed to be so tripped up.

The upshot of it was that both Rachel and her new acquaintance enjoyed an agreeable, an adventurous half hour. They got rapidly beyond conventionalities. One moment she thought him rude, the next delightful; just as she alternately appeared to him feminist and feminine. Above them the doomed beech trees, still green in the late August afternoon, spread their canopy of leaf, and through their close stems ran dark aisles of shadow. Below them was the tree-strewn hill-side. In the hollow Rachel could see Janet Leighton and Mrs. Fergusson among the measuring girls; the horses moving to and fro; the Canadian lumber-men catching at and guiding the logs; the trolleys descending the valley; while just opposite to them trunk after trunk was crashing down the hill, the line of the steel cable gleaming now and then in a fitful sunshine which had begun to slip out below a roof of purple cloud. Only one prisoner was left to look after the slide. The others had just gone down the hill, at a summons from below. Suddenly Ellesborough sprang to his feet.

"Good Heavens! what's that?" For a loud cry had rung out, accompanied by what sounded like a report. The man who had been standing among the dead brushwood on the other side of the descending timber, about a hundred yards away, had disappeared; and the huge beech just launched from above had ceased to move.

Another cry for help.

"The cable's broken!" said Ellesborough, starting at full speed for the slide. Rachel rushed after him, and presently caught him up where he knelt beside a man lying on the ground, and writhing in great pain. The prisoner's cap had fallen off, and revealed a young German lad of nineteen or twenty, hardly conscious, and groaning pitifully at intervals. As he lay crouched on his face, the red patches on his back, intended to guide the aim of an armed guard in case of any attempt to escape, showed with a sinister plainness.

"The cable snapped, and has caught him round the body," Ellesborough explained. "Give him this brandy, please, while I try and make out—"

With skilled and gentle fingers he began to explore the injury.

"A rib broken, I think." He looked with anxiety at some blood that had begun to appear on the lips. "I must go down and get some men and a stretcher. They won't know what to do without me. My second in command is off duty for the day. Can you look after him while I go? Awfully sorry to—"

He gave her a swift, investigating glance.

She interrupted him.

"Tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

He loosened the boy's collar and very gently tried to ease his position.

"Mamma!" murmured the boy, with the accent of a miserable child in a bad dream. Ellesborough's face softened. He bent over him and said something in German. Rachel did not understand it—only the compassionate look in the man's blue eyes.

"Give him more brandy if you can, and try and keep him still," said
Ellesborough as he rose to his feet. "I shall be back directly."

Her glance answered. By this time there was commotion below, the engine had stopped working and men were running up the hill. Ellesborough went bounding down the steep slope to meet them. They turned back with him, and Rachel supposed they had gone to fetch a stretcher, and if possible a doctor, from the small camp hospital which Mrs. Fergusson had pointed out to her near the gate. Meanwhile, for a few minutes, she was alone with this suffering lad. Was he fatally hurt—dying? She managed to get some brandy down, and then he lay groaning and unconscious, murmuring incoherent words. She caught "Mamma" again, then "Lisa," "Hans," and broken phrases that meant nothing to her. Was his mind back in some German home, which, perhaps, he would never see again?

All sorts of thoughts passed through her: vague memories gathered from the newspapers, of what the Germans had done in Belgium and France—horrible, indescribable things! Oh, not this boy, surely! He could not be more than nineteen. He must have been captured in the fighting of July, perhaps in his first action. Captain Ellesborough had said to her that there was no fighting spirit among any of the prisoners. They were thankful to find themselves out of it, "safely captured," as one of them had had the bravado to say, and with enough to eat. No doubt this boy had dreamt day and night of peace, and getting back to Germany, to "Mamma" and "Lisa" and "Hans." To die, if he was to die, by this clumsy accident, in an enemy country, was hard!

Pity, passionate pity sprang up in her, and it warmed her heart to remember the pity in the face of Captain Ellesborough. She would have hated him if he had shown any touch of a callous or cruel spirit towards this helpless creature. But there had been none.

In a few more minutes she was aware of Mrs. Fergusson and Janet climbing rapidly towards her. And behind them came stretcher-bearers, the captain, and possibly a doctor.

* * * * *

The accident broke up the working afternoon. The injured lad was carried to hospital, where the surgeon shook his head, and refused to prophesy till twenty-four hours were over.

Captain Ellesborough disappeared, while Rachel and Janet were given tea at the woman's hostel and shown the camp. Rachel took an absorbed interest in it all. This world of the new woman, with its widening horizons, its atmosphere of change and discovery, its independence of men, soothed some deep smart in her that Janet was only now beginning to realize. And yet, Janet remembered the vicar, and had watched the talk with Ellesborough. Clearly to be the professed enemy of man did not altogether disincline you for his company!

At any rate it seemed quite natural to Janet Leighton that, when it was time to go, and a charming girl in khaki with green facings caught the pony, and harnessed it for Mrs. Fergusson's parting guests, Ellesborough should turn up, as soon as the farewells were over; and that she should find herself driving the pony-carriage up the hill, while Ellesborough and Rachel walked behind, and at a lengthening distance. Once or twice she looked back, and saw that the captain was gathering some of the abounding wild flowers which had sprung up on the heels of the retreating forest, and that Rachel had fastened a bunch of them into her hat. She smiled to herself, and drove steadily on. Rachel was young and pretty. Marriage with some man—some day—was certainly her fate. The kind, unselfish Janet intended to "play up."

Then, with a jerk, she remembered there was a story. Nonsense! An unhappy love affair, no doubt, which had happened in her first youth, and in Canada. Well, such things, in the case of a girl with the temperament of Rachel, are only meant to be absorbed in another love affair. They are the leaf mould that feeds the final growth. Janet cheerfully said to herself that, probably, her partnership with Rachel would only be a short one.

The pair behind were, indeed, much occupied with each other. The tragic incident of the afternoon seemed to have carried them rapidly through the preliminary stages of acquaintance. At least, it led naturally to talk about things and feelings more real and intimate than generally haunt the first steps. And in this talk each found the other more and more congenial. Ellesborough was now half amused, half touched, by the mixture of childishness and maturity in Rachel. One moment her ignorance surprised him, and the next, some shrewd or cynical note in what she was saying scattered the ingénue impression, and piqued his curiosity afresh. She was indeed crassly ignorant about many current affairs in which he himself was keenly interested, and of which he supposed all educated women must by now have learnt the ABC. She could not have given him the simplest historical outline of the great war; he saw that she was quite uncertain whether Lloyd George or Asquith were Prime Minister; and as to politics and public persons in Canada, where she had clearly lived some time, her mind seemed to be a complete blank. None the less she had read a good deal—novels and poetry at least—and she took a queerly pessimistic view of life. She liked her farm work; she said so frankly. But on a sympathetic reply from him to the effect that he knew several other women who had taken to it, and they all seemed to be "happy" in it, she made a scornful mouth.

"Oh, well—'happy'?—that's a different thing. But it does as well as anything else."

The last thing she wanted, apparently, was to talk about Canada. He, himself, as a temporary settler in the Great Dominion, cherished an enthusiasm for Canada and a belief in the Canadian future, not, perhaps, very general among Americans; but although her knowledge of the country gave them inevitably some common ground, she continually held back from it, she entered on it as little as she could. She had been in the Dominion, he presently calculated, about seven or eight years; but she avoided names and dates, how adroitly, he did not perceive till they had parted, and he was thinking over their walk. She must have gone out to Canada immediately after leaving school. He gathered that her father had been a clergyman, and was dead; that she knew the prairie life, but had never been in British Columbia, and only a few days in Montreal and Toronto. That was all that, at the end of their walk, he knew; and all apparently she meant him to know. Whereas she on her side showed a beguiling power of listening to all he had to say about the mysterious infinity of the Canadian forest-lands and the wild life that, winter or spring, a man may live among them, which flattered the very human conceit of a strong and sensitive nature.

But at last they had climbed the tree-strewn slope, and were on the open ridge with the northern plain in view. The sun was now triumphantly out, just before his setting; the clouds had been flung aside, and he shone full upon the harvest world—such a harvest world as England had not seen for a century. There they lay, the new and golden fields, where, to north and south, to east and west, the soil of England, so long unturned, had joyously answered once more to its old comrade the plough.

"'An enemy hath done this,'" quoted Ellesborough, with an approving smile, as he pointed towards the plain. "But there was a God behind him!"

Rachel laughed. "Well, I've got three fields still to get in," she said.
"And they're the best. Goodnight."

She gave him her hand, standing transfigured in the light, the wind blowing her beautiful hair about her.

"May I come and see you?" he asked, rather formally.

She smiled assent.

"Next week everything will be in, and some of it threshed. I shall be freer then. You'll like our place."

He pressed her hand, and she was off, running like a fawn after the retreating pony carriage.

He turned away, a little dazzled and shaken. The image of her on the ridge remained; but what perhaps had struck deepest had been the sweetness of her as she hung above the injured boy. He went slowly towards the camp, conscious that the day now departing had opened a new door in the House of Life.