But that frown would always give place to a smile for any of his workers that he encountered, and a "Well, fine day again today. Beautiful weather it is, really! Let us hope it keeps up for another ten days, and then we shall do all right, if only——"
Ah, that was the cause for anxiety!
"If only we had a few more to help with us, now, to bring it in!"
"Mr. Price, we'll all work," I assured him one morning, "like two!"
"Indeed, I know that. You are doing splendidly," he said kindly. "But you can't do more than flesh and blood, after all! And, dear me!"—he pushed the cap yet further to one side—"when I think—— Now, this farm is only just under a thousand acres." His blue eyes swept the green-and-rusty-gold view of it.
"Sixty acres I used to have under corn," he went on, "and now what have I got? One hundred and fifty! I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me in 'Fourteen. And then I had all the men. Even then we considered we had a big enough job on at harvest time. But now—— Who is there? Myself and Ivor and the soldier-substitute, and——"
He went off murmuring to himself, shaking his tweed-capped head in a worried way over the problem that gave him more than three times the work he had known before the war, but to be done by one-fourth of the staffs that had been his in peace-time!
All over the country, as we knew, that problem stared the farmers of 1918 in the face.
We Land Girls were doing our bit towards helping to solve it. Yes! Elizabeth and Vic and I, with all the other Vics and Dorises, the Aggies and Jeans, and Gladyses, and Eileens of Britain. But even so there were not yet enough of us trained and able to cope with the problem. We were ready to give all our time, and all our strength, and all our good-will.
But all the good-will in the world does not turn a woman, however much else she can accomplish, into a creature that can do a man's day's work in the harvest-field. Ask the farmers, who have nothing but praise for their loyal Land Girls.